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The East China Sea is a semi-closed sea bordered by the Yellow Sea to the north, the South China Sea and Taiwan to the South, Japan's Ryukyu and Kyushu islands to the East and the Chinese mainland to the West. Evidence pointing to potentially abundant oil and natural gas deposits has made the sea a source of contention between Japan and China, the two largest energy consumers in Asia.

The sea has a total area of approximately 482,000 square miles, consisting mostly of the continental shelf and the Xihu/Okinawa (Chinese name/Japanese name) trough, a back-arc basin formed about 300 miles southeast of Shanghai between the two countries. The disputed eight Daioyu/Senkaku (Chinese/Japanese name) islands lie to the northeast of Taiwan, with the largest of them two miles long and less than a mile wide. Though barren, the islands are important for strategic and political reasons, as ownership can be used to bolster claims to the surrounding sea and its resources under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. To date, China and Japan have not resolved their ownership dispute, preventing wide-scale exploration and development of East China Sea hydrocarbons.

The admission that a crisis exists is a critical moment, because this is when most others start to change their behavior in reaction to the crisis.

First, The New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-recipient Paul Krugman penned a piece titled "Hitting China's Wall." He wrote, "The signs are now unmistakable: China is in big trouble.

. Chinese pilots are more actively shadowing U.S. military aircraft flying through the airspace between China and Japan. Chinese aircraft have also reportedly violated Japanese airspace near the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands several times since mid-December, prompting Japan to send its aircraft, including F-15Js, to monitor Chinese actions. 


Until 2012, the dispute over the islands was only an occasional source of tension between China and Japan. The two sides had operated under a tacit agreement: China would not push its claims if Japan did not develop the islands. In April 2012, then-Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, in a speech at the Heritage Foundation, announced the city's plans to purchase the Senkaku Islands from their Japanese private owner. This action forced the Japanese central government to purchase the islands outright rather than continue to rent them from the private owners or allow Ishihara to buy the islands and possibly begin to build facilities on them.


China's current economic model, and by extension its political and social model, is reaching its limits just as it had prior to Deng's administration.

It is worth recalling just how extraordinary Deng's 1978 meeting was. Mao Zedong had died only two years earlier, taking with him what little remained of the old pillars of Communist Party legitimacy. China was a mess, ravaged by years of economic mismanagement and uncontrolled population growth and only beginning to recover from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution.

Had the People's Republic fallen in 1978 or shortly thereafter, few would have been truly surprised. Of course, in those tense early post-Mao years hardly anyone could foresee just how rapid China's transformation would be.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, signaling communism's defeat in Europe, security experts talked about a shift in diplomatic and military energies to the Pacific. But Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 led to a decadelong preoccupation with the Middle East, with the U.S. Army leading a land war against Iraq in 1991 and the Navy and Air Force operating no-fly zones for years thereafter. Then came 9/11, and the Bush administration's initiation of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a response. Finally, the ending of both those conflicts is in sight, and the United States, rather than return to quasi-isolationism as it has done with deleterious effect after other ground wars in its history, is attempting to pivot its focus to the geographical heart of the global economy: the Indian and Pacific oceans.

The Indian Ocean is the world's energy interstate, across which passes crude oil and natural gas from the Arabian Peninsula and Iranian Plateau to the burgeoning, middle-class urban sprawls of East Asia.

Heightened activity of the world’s most powerful navy along China’s maritime periphery struck a nerve, since China has fallen victim to several invasions from powerful foreign navies over the past two centuries. Beijing, for its part, staged several military exercises in the South China Sea, East China Sea and Yellow Sea, and protested loudly against Washington’s “Cold War mentality” in pursuing a strategy of containment against China. Washington frequently pointed out that if Beijing had not severed military communications, the two sides would have a better understanding of each other’s activities and intentions.

Heightened activity of the world’s most powerful navy along China’s maritime periphery struck a nerve, since China has fallen victim to several invasions from powerful foreign navies over the past two centuries. Beijing, for its part, staged several military exercises in the South China Sea, East China Sea and Yellow Sea, and protested loudly against Washington’s “Cold War mentality” in pursuing a strategy of containment against China. Washington frequently pointed out that if Beijing had not severed military communications, the two sides would have a better understanding of each other’s activities and intentions.

Heightened activity of the world’s most powerful navy along China’s maritime periphery struck a nerve, since China has fallen victim to several invasions from powerful foreign navies over the past two centuries. Beijing, for its part, staged several military exercises in the South China Sea, East China Sea and Yellow Sea, and protested loudly against Washington’s “Cold War mentality” in pursuing a strategy of containment against China. Washington frequently pointed out that if Beijing had not severed military communications, the two sides would have a better understanding of each other’s activities and intentions.

An era ended when the Soviet Union collapsed on Dec. 31, 1991. The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union defined the Cold War period. The collapse of Europe framed that confrontation.

The first was U.S. power. The second was the rise of China as the center of global industrial growth based on low wages. The third was the re-emergence of Europe as a massive, integrated economic power.

China's leaders will likely survive this trial. But what if they don't? What if China faces a severe socio-economic crisis and attendant political one of an unforeseen magnitude? What would be the second-order geopolitical effects? If Syria explodes, it does so regionally. If China explodes, it does so globally.

Such a crisis could lead to an upsurge in nationalism, an emotion that can be easily dialed upwards by Communist party leaders as a means of clinging to power.

China's defense budget has already increased eight-fold since 2001, and might continue to do so under a more nationalist-style regime (even amid slowing growth), enabling China to further implement an anti-access area-denial strategy in the East and South China seas, emphasizing submarine, ballistic missile, and cyber warfare capabilities.

What is the fundamental purpose of Xi's anti-corruption campaign? An attempt to answer this question will not tell us China's political future, but it will tell us something about Xi's strategy -- not only for consolidating his personal influence within the Party, government and military apparatuses, but also and more important, for managing the immense social, economic, political and international pressures that are likely to come to a head in China during his tenure.

The announcement July 29 of a formal investigation into retired Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang marked something of an end to the first major phase of Xi's anti-corruption campaign.

Zhou was known to sit at the apex of at least these three power bases, and his influence likely extended deep into many more, making him not only a formidable power broker but also, at least in the case of his oil industry ties, a major potential obstacle to reform.

Generational shifts take time to play out and often begin with a period of denial as the forces of the international system struggle to preserve the old order. In 2013, that state of denial will persist in many areas. But we are more than four years into this cyclical transformation, and change is becoming more palpable and much harder to deny with every passing month.

Despite America’s best efforts to construct stronger ties with China, relations in-between both countries have been repeatedly buffeted by a series of tensions and misunderstandings. Many of these frictions appear to have resulted from a more assertive Chinese posture in the South China Sea.

When attempting to explain this upsurge in Chinese pugnacity, analysts have pointed to the rising power's selective interpretation of the law of the sea and growing unwillingness to compromise over what it calls its “blue national soil”, particularly when confronted with an increasingly intransigent domestic populace.

Others have pointed to the more immediately tangible benefits to be derived from the presence of numerous offshore oil and gas deposits within contested waters.

As the competitive advantage of low-cost, export-oriented manufacturing in China's coastal industrial hubs wanes, Beijing will rely more heavily on the cities along the western and central stretches of the Yangtze River to drive the development of a supplemental industrial base throughout the country's interior.

China's ostensible willingness to suddenly take the next step in Gwadar comes while the United States is in the process of pulling out of Afghanistan. Were Afghanistan to even partially stabilize following the withdrawal of U.S. troops, it would conceivably open up supply routes connecting Gwadar to Central Asia, and ultimately to China. This would ease China's so-called "Malacca dilemma," in which China is too dependent on the Strait of Malacca (and the nearby Lombok and Makassar straits) for the importation of hydrocarbons from the Middle East.

This array of Indian Ocean ports has been dubbed China's "string of pearls." Those skeptical of the concept have said that China has little desire or capacity to build naval bases in these places. But the string of pearls was never properly meant to imply naval bases per se. It is a far subtler concept, as I fully elaborated upon in my 2010 book, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power. In my reporting trips to Gwadar, Hambantota and other Indian Ocean ports where the Chinese have been active, I described a possible commercial, political, strategic and lastly military venture, the constituent elements of which cannot be disaggregated. To be sure, we live in a post-modern world of eroding distinctions: a world where coast guards sometimes act more aggressively than navies, where sea power is civilian as well as military, where access denial can be as relevant as the ability to engage in fleet-on-fleet battle and where the placement of warships is vital less for sea battles than for diplomatic ones.

China realizes the use of these ports will always be dependent upon good political and economic relations with the host country, which is why China has been active on all economic and political fronts in helping Pakistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and so on. Indeed, China may be Pakistan's most reliable political ally. Beijing also helped the Sri Lankan regime win a civil war against ethnic Tamil rebels. And China competes with India over aid to Bangladesh.

This dynamism is not limited to China. The Scottish referendum and waves of secession movements -- from Spain's Catalonia to Turkey and Iraq's ethnic Kurds -- are working in different directions.

in China, one of the most intractable issues in the struggle for unity -- the status of Tibet -- is poised for a possible reversal, or at least a major adjustment.

More important, a settlement between Beijing and the Dalai Lama could be a major step in lessening the physical and psychological estrangement between the Chinese heartland and the Tibetan Plateau.

Indian elites hate when India is hyphenated with Pakistan, a poor and semi-chaotic state; they much prefer to be hyphenated with China.