At the same time, leaders in Tokyo and Seoul have also expressed strong concerns over recent Chinese provocations. Two days after Chinese fighter aircraft conducted an unsafe intercept of a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft operating in international airspace, on June 9 a People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) frigate entered a contiguous zone (CZ) adjacent to the twelve-nautical-mile Japanese territorial sea around the Senkaku Islands. While Chinese Coast Guard vessels have periodically entered the CZ near the Japanese-administered Senkakus, this was the first time since 2004 that Beijing dispatched a PLAN warship into this disputed area. Exacerbating the matter, three Russian Navy vessels also sailed into the same CZ around the same time as the PLAN vessel, raising suspicions of coordination and speculation of a possible emerging alliance between Beijing and Moscow to challenge U.S. preeminence in the Asia-Pacific. China is also pursuing ongoing construction of two gas drilling rigs near the CZ median line, despite the fact that Beijing and Tokyo negotiated—but never implemented—a 2008 bilateral agreement to demarcate maritime boundaries. In early August, Chinese Coast Guard ships, accompanied by more than two hundred fishing vessels, entered the disputed waters around the Senkaku Islands, and one of China’s many oil platforms was found to have a military-grade surface radar installed on it. Four more Chinese Coast Guard vessels entered the disputed waters around the Senkakus on September 11, marking the first such incident since China’s General Secretary Xi Jinping and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met on the sidelines of the G-20 summit. On August 18, three Chinese strategic bombers trespassed into the overlapping area of China and South Korea’s air defense identification zones (ADIZ) and approached the disputed Suyan Reef. Many observers saw this provocation as a show of force by Beijing, which continues to voice strong displeasure with Seoul’s decision to place the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea. Tensions between Beijing and Seoul flared again on October 7, when a Chinese fishing boat rammed into and sank a South Korean coast guard vessel during a confrontation in the Yellow Sea. Finally, on October 12, Tokyo revealed that Beijing had restarted drilling at two gas platforms in the East China Sea, which brings the total number of explorational platforms to sixteen. Beijing’s actions came over one month following a meeting between Abe and Xi at the G-20 summit, at which both sides agreed that they should resume dialogue.

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/partnership-can-stop-china-the-south-china-sea-18233?page=2