There's a lot of verbal spear-shaking and saber-rattling going on, but the response on the water has been pretty restrained. The PLAN has kept well away. A couple of CMS ships have been sailing around, but the Japanese Coast Guard has ignored them.Originally Posted by Ray
"Teach Japan a lesson" is easy to say but doing it could be complicated. In a full scale war China might prevail due to attrition, but war is an unpredictable business and a full scale war could have all kinds of very negative ramifications for China. I doubt very much that the Chinese would want to try to initiate a naval skirmish or other limited conflict in order to "teach Japan a lesson". The Japanese may call their navy a Maritime Self Defense Force but it is in fact one of the most modern and capable navies on the planet within its range of influence, and the Chinese could easily come off second best, which would be politically excruciating. Japan is a poor candidate for bullying, and going out to teach a lesson and coming back with a black eye and a bloody nose is not the message anyone wants to send to the domestic audience.
I don't know that it's possible to say what "China" as a unitary entity "wants". Certainly there's a widespread desire to be recognized as a big player, and on some levels a widespread desire to show some muscle and slap someone around. I don't think China's leaders care as much about "respect" from abroad as they do with maintaining just enough jingoist spirit to keep the public eye away from domestic sources of friction. Nationalism and pride are useful things for a government, especially when the populace has good reasons for discontent.
Of course the Chinese leadership has to walk a thin line. They want to keep that pride and that nationalist spirit going, but they also have to consider that actually getting involved in conflict would not necessarily be a good thing for them. There's certainly some in China who would like to have a "splendid little war" to confirm China's arrival in the global circle of great powers, but keeping wars splendid and little is not always assured. Taking a bite at Japan or Vietnam would be risky: either could bite back, and a fight with a less than victorious outcome would be a political disaster. The Philippines would be easy, but there remains the matter of that treaty with the US. I think the Chinese could probably contrive an incident, sink the Philippine Navy and get away with it without the US actually doing any shooting, but "probably" carries some risk as well.
We shall see. So far the preferred approach seems to be to talk aggressively but studiously avoid armed confrontation, doing the pushing and shoving with the unarmed CMS as the proxy for the PLAN. I don't think there's any plan to escalate beyond that, though of course what's planned and what happens ain't always the same...
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