Chinese Troop Movements Signal War? Taiwan, Japan and South Korea targets?

Surely Chinese cannot be moving tanks around during the period of the Chinese new year celebrations just like that for fireworks shows?

Tanks, one by one, moving along a main road in China’s coastal Fujian province. Driving up speculations that the Chinese military may be warming up for war. Local residents took these pictures between February 3 to February 6. At times, the line of tanks and artillery blocked traffic for several miles. And it wasn’t just in Fujian province. These military vehicles were spotted further up the coast, in neighboring Zhejiang province. According to dissident website, molihua.org, these tanks in Hubei province are being transported from a military base to the coast. The troop movements come after months of escalating tensions between China and Japan over the disputed territory of the Diaoyun, or Senkaku islands and they’re known in Japan. It’s caused international worries that the two countries may be on the cusp of war. Both sides have scrambled jets and warships in the region. In January, during naval exercise near the disputed waters, Chinese warships reportedly directed their targeting radar at a Japanese vessel. On February 7, State-run Global Times published this article saying there is a “serious possibility” a military conflict may flare up between China and Japan. It continues to say that fewer and fewer people are hopeful for a peaceful resolution to the Diaoyu Island crisis. Are we in a countdown to war between China and Japan? NTD will continue to keep you posted as the situation develops.

With Burma in mind, China quietly supports Wa rebels

China wants Myanmar to become a communist ruled failed satellite state like Nepal, North Korea.

Chinese external spy agency Ministry of State Security [MSS] involved so that Chinese government can maintain a degree of deniability

While Burma’s military steps up battles against Kachin rebels along the border with China, security analysts say Beijing has been quietly selling advanced weapons to another insurgent group on its border, the United Wa State Army. The Wa are the largest militia in Burma and considered the biggest narcotics dealing organization in Southeast Asia.Burma’s military airstrikes and mortar attacks on Kachin rebels in recent weeks raised international concerns about the government’s peace efforts. The heavy fighting in Burma’s north is the worst since a 17-year cease-fire with the Kachin Independence Army broke down in 2011.
But while China calls for military restraint in Kachin state, security analysts say Beijing has been secretly arming another rebel group, the United Wa State Army.
In a December report, IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review says China last year provided the Wa with advanced weapons to build up their defenses. The transfers included surface to air missiles and, for the first time, at least 12 armored vehicles the report refers to as “tank destroyers.”
Thailand-based security analyst and author of the report, Anthony Davis, said Beijing is trying to balance historic camaraderie with the Wa and its relations with Burmese authorities.
“The Chinese cannot afford to ignore the ethnic forces along their border, nor at the same time can they afford to ignore the central government,” Davis said. “Is that to say that China is directly supplying that equipment? No, it’s not. Clearly the supplier of that equipment is known to senior elements in the government, but that is not to say that they are directly involved in financing. They need to maintain a degree of deniability here,” he said.
China’s Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review report.
The Wa are Burma’s largest rebel group, estimated at up to 30,000 full and part-time fighters. Despite its professed policy of non-interference, military analysts say China has long been the largest supplier of weapons to the Wa, albeit unofficially.
The Wa were one of several ethnic militias that formed after the 1989 breakup of the Burmese Communist Party.
Beijing directly supported the communists and maintained relations with the newly formed rebel groups.
Yale University Ph. D. candidate Josh Gordon said China has been particularly close with the Wa, who speak Chinese. The Wa are more or less a proxy of China, said Gordon.

“You’ll use Chinese money, Chinese cell phones, Chinese electricity for in large part, where there is electricity in the urban areas, and have connection to the Chinese Internet,” he said.
Burma signed a cease-fire with the Wa in the 1990s and allowed them to govern their own territory in northeastern Shan state. They turned it into one of Asia’s largest methamphetamine production bases and are considered the region’s largest drug-dealing organization.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in 2011 put most-wanted pictures of Wa leader Wei Hsueh Kang in Thailand’s entertainment venues.

Despite the recent escalation in Chinese weapons transfers to the Wa, Davis said Beijing is not trying to destabilize the border area. Instead, China is sending a message to Burmese authorities not to even think about attempting in Wa territory what they are doing in Kachin state where local groups are fighting Burmese forces, he said.
“The Chinese are not stoking fires in Northern Burma. By reinforcing the Wa they are reinforcing a military deterrent. If you like, they are reinforcing peace and stability which has existed for the last 20 years in a manner that’s been favorable to China.”

During past decades of military rule and western sanctions, China held great sway over Burma and its natural resources. But since Burma’s reform-minded President Thein Sein took office, and sanctions were suspended, China’s influence is being thrown off balance.
Davis said the weapons tranfers to the Wa appear to be China responding to its political reversals.
Ye Htut, a spokesman for Burma’s president, declined to comment on the report by IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review.

“We don’t have any information on that,” he said. “But, every time the Chinese government assures us they will not interfere in our internal affairs. So we accept their assurance.”
China this month sent a high-level military delegation to Burma to discuss border security issues and the fighting in Kachin state. The official New Light of Myanmar newspaper said the Chinese agreed not to interfere with Burma’s internal problems.

China selling weapons to ethnic army in Shan State ?

Move comes after the Myitsone dam project was being developed jointly by Burma and China at the head of the Irrawaddy river in Burma's northern Kachin state was cancelled.

China has dismissed as “ill-founded” and “misguided” allegations it sold or delivered weapons to the about 30,000-strong United Wa State Army in Shan State.

"The Chinese government holds a clear and consistent policy of respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Myanmar," its embassy here said in a statement issued on Sunday.

Reports alleging China had sold or transferred weapons to ethnic armed groups in Myanmar are misguided, it said. The media reports are based on an erroneous “report by a western defence think-tank” it said, referring to Janes Intelligence Review, which released a report last month alleging that China’s effort to arm the ethnic army was “unprecedented both in the quantity of munitions and the type of systems delivered”. The report described the alleged arms deal as “highly likely to have stemmed from a high-level decision made in Beijing”.

Weapons the Wa Army received included ground-to-air missiles and 12 tank destroyers, the report stated.

The embassy stressed that China had always given strong support to a peaceful solution to the conflict within Myanmar through dialogue and negotiation by both sides. “China in recent days repeatedly called for an immediate ceasefire and joint efforts to resume peace and stability along the border area,” it said.

“China has persistently played a constructive role in promoting peace and facilitating dialogue towards the resolution of the conflict. We will continue to do so,” the statement added.

The Janes Intelligence Review report alleges that a transfer of Chinese-made PTL02 Wheeled Tank Destroyers was made in the middle of last year. The report’s author, Thailand-based intelligence analyst Anthony Davis, described this as “a significant escalation in the equipment supply to the [Wa army]” from China.

Rising support for the ethnic army coincides with political developments in Myanmar that worry Beijing, primarily increased openness to diplomatic and military ties with the United States, the report said.

China-Japan : The drums of war

Hallucinating Chinese arm chair generals high on the polluted air of Beijing openly talking of war on TV talk shows

WATCH Chinese television these days and you might conclude that the outbreak of war with Japan over what it calls the Senkaku and China the Diaoyu islands is only a matter of time. You might well be right. Since Japan in September announced it would “nationalise” three of the islands that had been privately owned, China, which has long contested Japan’s sovereignty over them, has also started challenging its resolve to keep control of them. So both countries are claiming to own the islands and both are pretending to administer them. China this week announced its intention to map them thoroughly. Something has to give.

Since then China, too, has become more assertive over the islands. Already, in his speech to the Communist Party’s five-yearly congress in November, Hu Jintao, its outgoing leader, had declared China’s ambition to “build itself into a maritime power”, the first time this had been stated so explicitly. Nor is it clear that his successor, the less wooden Xi Jinping, who will be named president in March, shares his predecessors’ habitual caution in dealings with America. He will surely see no benefit in compromising with Japan, which is despised by many Chinese. And, with little or no military experience, he will want to appear a strong commander-in-chief.

It is against this backdrop that televised military punditry is booming in China. On current-affairs programmes, armchair warriors pontificate about the Diaoyus. Newspapers propagate a uniformly jingoistic analysis of the increasing likelihood of armed conflict.


They are not making it up. Last month a small aircraft of China’s State Oceanic Bureau flew into what Japan considers its territorial airspace over the Senkakus. Flying too low to be detected by Japan’s land-based radar, it was spotted too late for a scramble of eight F-15 fighter jets to prove effective. Since then, Japan has deployed Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS). On January 7th Chinese patrol ships spent more than 13 hours near the islands—longer than ever before, said Japanese officials. On January 10th, when two Japanese F-15s scrambled to intercept a Chinese plane flying near the islands, China scrambled its own fighter jets.

Now the Japanese air force is weighing whether to fire warning shots if Chinese aircraft come into its airspace, for the first time since 1987, when the former Soviet Union intruded. For General Peng Guanqian of the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, interviewed on a Chinese web portal, this would amount to the first shot of “actual combat”. China should then “respond without courtesy”, he said. The Japanese press reported that America had also warned Japan against firing shots.
A widely read, if shrill, Beijing newspaper, Global Times, has argued that Japan might not be deterred and “we need to prepare for the worst”. Japan, it said, had become the “vanguard” of an American strategy to “contain China”. The implication was that China should also be ready to take on America, which has made clear that its security treaty with Japan covers the disputed islets.

China’s PLA officials say troops are to prepare for war amid territorial disputes with Japan

The PLA aims to beef up its troops' combat readiness and prepare for actual war situations through exercises this year, according to the latest annual training directive, amid escalating tensions between China and Japan over territorial disputes in the East China Sea.

"In 2013, the goal set for the entire army and the People's Armed Police force is to bolster their capabilities to fight and their ability to win a war … to be well-prepared for a war by subjecting the army to hard and rigorous training on an actual combat basis," according to yesterday's People's Liberation Army Daily, which referred to a training blueprint issued by the PLA's Department of the General Staff for the entire force.

The directive came in stark contrast to that of its predecessor. In last year's directive, more emphasis was placed on joint military trainings and co-ordination among different PLA services.
This year's statement stresses the urgency of real combat abilities in all military training by repeating the phrase "fighting wars", or dazhang, as many as 10 times in the article, which was no more than 1,000 words. The phrase did not appear in last year's directive.

The changes could be a result of the rising tensions in waters between China and Japan, while they might also indicate that there is a different focus for the PLA, since the Central Military Commission's chairman Hu Jintao was succeeded by Xi Jinping , the new PLA commander-in-chief since November.
Separately, state broadcast media reported in the past week that the PLA's naval air force kicked off the open-sea training portion of its annual exercise programme. No details were given on the specific dates or duration.


The General Staff department's training directive came a day after Japan's Self-Defence Forces conducted a massive military exercise on training grounds in Narashino, on the outskirts of Tokyo, on Sunday, in which 20 aircraft, 300 personnel and 33 vehicles participated.
Japanese Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera issued a statement after the drill insisting that Chinese ships had trespassed in "Japanese waters" near the Senkaku Islands, which are known in China as the Diaoyus, and that the security surrounding Japan was therefore being tightened.
The disputed chain of islands in the East China Sea has been claimed by both China and Japan since the early 1970s.
Andrei Chang, editor-in-chief of the Canada-based Kanwa Defence Review, said, "The PLA is making its propaganda voice louder this year, aside from shifting their target to Japan instead of the Philippines last year," adding the statement was more or less the same as last year's.

Japan War Games Defense Of Disputed Islands Against China

China Newspaper Says To 'Prepare For The Worst' After Military Confrontation With Japan In The East China Sea

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/754886.shtml

"Peaceful" Rise of China demonstrating itself

Y-8 plane game of China

Y-8 a transport plane, and it can be, but the aircraft has more than 30 variants. The Y-8 performs everything from Mineral Research, to Geophysical Surveying, to Electronic Warfare to Intelligence Gathering and one variant is simply an innocuous but lethal fully loaded gunship, with two heavy cannons and three heavy machine guns.

It's the perfect plane for a game of cat and mouse because if the Y-8 ever received fire from Japan's F-15s, China could simply maintain it was an unarmed transport model carrying troops, or the Y8-F model that carries only livestock.

In the meantime, the plane can perform all manner of sophisticated tests on the seabed floor, while eavesdropping on Japanese communications. China has been flying these planes consistently lately to surveil the contested island chain that's supposed to hold billions in oil and gas reserves.

 After repeatedly flying surveillance aircraft into disputed airspace with Japan, which made Tokyo scramble F-15s in response, China sent fighters of its own on Thursday into the East China Sea.

A Friday press release out of China confirms the incident began when Beijing was flying a Shaanxi Y-8 on a "routine Thursday patrol" over the "oil and gas fields in the East China Sea."


So, again, on Thursday Japan spotted aircraft in its Air Defense Identification Zone (above the islands) that it believed to be Chinese J-7 interceptors, along with some J-10 fighters whose combat abilities rival that of Western jets. Japan responded with two F-15s scrambled from Naha, Okinawa — just a couple hundred miles away. There are minor variations from either side about who sent what first, but all agree the aircraft met above the islands.

The Chinese planes scattered soon after, but this marked the first time China and Japan flung military assets at one another over the East China Sea island dispute. A line was crossed and staying behind it in the future will only be more difficult.

n interesting fact about Naha, aside from its proximity to the contested territory, is that while being fairly remote, it is also home to Alfred R. Magleby, a United States Consul General who holds a M.S. in Strategic Studies from the U.S. Naval War College. This is appropriate, since the Naha Port (formerly Military) Facility is part of U.S. Forces Japan and the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma is less than nine miles from where Japan's F-15s scrambled.

In the future, when responding to China's fighter deployment, if Japan considers permitting its F-15 pilots to fire tracer bullets as warning shots against Chinese planes, it is now reasonable to assume that U.S. forces at Futenma may have an indirect say in that decision.

Firing tracers, which usually contain phosphorous or some highly flammable material, sends a line of light through the air like a laser. Tracers are usually loaded in about every tenth round to let gunners know where they're shooting, but in this case they would be fired to show Chinese pilots they're being fired upon.

The Chinese jets are likely flying from air base Shuimen, built east of the islands in Fujian Province, not too much farther from the islands than Naha, Okinawa. So both sides have assets equally within reach of the islands.

China transfers 11 PLA Navy warships to marine surveillance

China has transferred two destroyers and nine other ex-navy vessels to its maritime surveillance fleet, reports said Monday, as it moves to beef up its position in bitter territorial rows with Japan and other neighbors.

Beijing renovated the ships and transferred them to surveillance operations to “alleviate the insufficiency of vessels used to protect maritime interests,” said a report on Tencent, one of China’s major news portals.

China is embroiled in a maritime dispute with Japan that has seen tensions between the two Asian giants, the world’s second- and third-largest economies, at times reach fever pitch.

It is also engaged in a simmering row with its southern neighbors over its claim to vast swathes of the South China Sea.

Beijing has been sending maritime patrol vessels into waters around the East China Sea islands — which it claims as the Diaoyu and which Japan controls and calls the Senkaku — since Tokyo nationalized the chain in September.

China is apparently seeking to prove it can come and go in the area at will and on Monday three of Beijing’s ships were spotted in the waters around the islands, according to Japan’s coastguard, in the latest perceived incursion.


Two of Beijing’s newly refurbished vessels are destroyers, with one each to operate in the East and South China Seas, with the others including tugs, icebreakers and survey ships, according to the Tencent report.

The destroyers, the Nanjing and Nanning, numbered 131 and 162 respectively, each had a displacement of 3,250 metric tons and had a top speed of 32 knots, according to sinodefence.com, an independent UK-based website.

It said that during their time in the navy they were equipped with 130mm guns with a range of 29 kilometers, anti-ship missiles and other weapons.

The Nanjing went into service in 1977 and the Nanning in 1979. Both retired this year from the Chinese navy, previous domestic media reports said.

It was not clear whether it was the first time the maritime surveillance fleet has acquired destroyers, or when the transfers took place.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment when asked about the destroyers at its regular briefing on Monday.

Officials at the Ministry of Defense and headquarters of the China Marine Surveillance were not immediately available to comment when contacted by AFP.

The transfer report was first published in the International Herald Leader, a Chinese-language newspaper linked to Beijing’s official news agency Xinhua, and the author said the operation had been given significantly more capacity.

“The maritime surveillance team’s power has been greatly strengthened and its capacity to execute missions sharply improved, providing a fundamental guarantee for completing the currently arduous task to protect maritime interests,” wrote Yu Zhirong, of the government’s Research Center for Chinese Marine Development.

Since 2000 the maritime surveillance fleet, which is tasked with “protecting China’s interests and executing law enforcement missions,” has also received a total of 13 new vessels, the report said.

Daily patrols have been stepped up from six vessels before the disputes heated up to “more than 10” Yu said, adding authorities planned to build another 36 surveillance ships by 2015.

A Chinese plane overflew the islands in the East China Sea earlier this month, in what Japan said was the first time Beijing had breached its airspace since at least 1958. Tokyo scrambled fighter jets in response.

Japan mulls spy drones for East China Sea

Moves come in response to a report that China has transferred two destroyers and nine other former navy vessels to its maritime surveillance fleet.

JAPAN is considering introducing US spy drones to boost surveillance of its territorial waters near islands in the East China Sea at the centre of a bitter dispute with Beijing, Kyodo News says.
The Japanese defence ministry hopes to introduce the unmanned Global Hawk aircraft by 2015 "in a bid to counter China's growing assertiveness at sea, especially when it comes to the Senkaku Islands", the news agency said, citing unnamed government officials.
Beijing has been sending maritime patrol vessels into waters around the Japanese-controlled islands, which China claims as Diaoyu, since Tokyo nationalised the chain in September.
China is apparently seeking to prove that it can come and go in the area at will, and on Monday three of Beijing's ships were spotted in the waters around the islands, according to Japan's coastguard, in the latest perceived incursion.

China says its plane harassed by Japanese military aircraft

We all along knew about the "peaceful" rise of China

 A government spokesman confirmed on Thursday that a Chinese maritime surveillance plane was harassed by Japanese military aircraft while patrolling airspace near the Diaoyu Islands.

Japan's action was meant to escalate the situation and it should bear the consequences, said Shi Qingfeng, spokesman for the State Oceanic Administration (SOA).

Shi said the Chinese plane was conducting a routine patrol in airspace over the East China Sea about 150 km away from the Diaoyu Islands.

Shi said the flight route used by the plane has been used by Chinese surveillance planes since 2007.

"The Japanese side's disturbance was intended to cause confusion and distort the truth," Shi said. ;)

Chinese ships enter Japanese waters near disputed islands

Will this trigger off a Sino-Japanese war ?

Three Chinese ships entered into Japanese territorial water near the disputed Senkaku Islands on Friday morning and were staying despite a warning from a Japanese Coast Guard ship, the coast guard said.

The move continues a dispute between the nations that stretches back decades.

Last week, Japan scrambled fighter jets near the small islands in the East China Sea after a Chinese plane was seen there.

Chinese government ships have repeatedly entered the waters around the remote, rocky islands since the Japanese government announced in September it was buying several of the islands from private owners.

Japanese Coast Guard vessels have engaged in games of cat and mouse with the Chinese ships, with both sides broadcasting messages to one another insisting they have territorial sovereignty over the area.

Analysts say that by sending its own patrols into the area, China is challenging Japan's de facto control of the islands, which has been the status quo for the past 40 years.

100-bird PLAAF drill....who is China going to war with?

Color coding seems perfect. The blue color aircraft taxiing over the runway seems to be the AWACS

Air Base aircraft parking and traffic management systems seems to be very advanced and sophisticated

AWACS Tail number 30672