US-Japanese plans to "strangle China"

South China Sea Dispute series:

Part I: Taiwan's Claim to a South China Sea EEZ, August 11 2020
Part II: Forbes: "Strangle China's Economy," August 24, 2020
Part III: US-Japanese plans to "strangle China"

Toshi Yoshihara in his report Dragon Against the Sun, presents the views of Chinese strategic thinkers particularly with respect to the "island chain" problem for China. The author makes an extensive presentation on the Chinese maritime strategy perspective from open sources published in China, and then proceeds to critically examine them. In a video presentation associated with the report the author makes a telling Freudian slip in connection with the US-Japan alliance aimed at containing China. Wishing to emphasize the need for US-Japanese "cohesion," he slips and says "coercion."

In his report, the author presents this Chinese view of the Japanese strategy:

Zhang Ming concurs:
From Japan’s perspective, complicating and internationalizing the South China Sea problem will create an interactive dynamic between the East China Sea and the South China Sea disputes. This linkage will help to diffuse the energy of China’s rights protection [维权] efforts in the direction of the East China Sea, exhaust China’s good-neighbor diplomacy, and confer
more leverage to Japan in negotiations with China over the East China Sea.95*

*Dragon Against the Sun: Chinese views of Japanese Seapower, Toshi Yoshihara
https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/CSBA8211_(Dragon_against_the_Sun_Report)_FINAL.pdf
https://csbaonline.org/research/publications/dragon-against-the-sun-chinese-views-of-japanese-seapower

Necessarily, Toshi Yoshihara finds Chinese assessments of Japanese motives for an offensive maritime strategy that challenges the growing Chinese "threat" are based on faulty Chinese analysis. According to Yoshihara, the Chinese experts are unduly influenced by caricatures of Japan as a warlike civilization, if not outright Chinese racism against Japan. This is a most ironic projection, as both the US and Japan are notoriously subject to ethnocentric, if not wholly racist, concepts of exceptionalism, providing justifications for their condescending views of other countries. But to Yoshihara, the Japanese strategy (like that of the US) is ostensibly motivated by principle seeking only the rewards of the so called "rules based order." So he is, in effect, preaching to the choir here in the US. Yoshihara does yeoman's work trying to defuse, disguise and dismiss the Chinese notion that there is historic continuity with Meiji military expansionism in the current Japanese maritime strategy. Japan's modern maritime policy reflects their tradition of adopting western and US theories of seapower which are essentially offensive in nature. The US role of enabling Japan's offensive maritime domination of East Asia in the early 20th Century is attributed to England for obvious reasons. One might otherwise be somewhat reticent about wholeheartedly embracing an imperial maritime alliance strategy that could lead to a major war, again, by underestimating the scope of Japanese strategic goals.

Yet increased risk of war, is attributed by Yoshihara to growth in Chinese naval power and irrational "self referential" Chinese myopia concerning US-Japanese alliance motives. It is far more likely, that the reinforcing phenomenon of two powerful states, Japan and the US, both with extensive traditions of imperialism and a religious like faith in gunboat diplomacy will cause the next major war. The institutional nature of the alliance as a structure, whose requirements are served by an infrastructure that permeates government institutions, industry, business, academia, and media in both countries raises the possibility that the Japanese "self defense" forces are not just subservient to the American naval command, but may in fact be unduly influencing American strategy to Japanese ends. In the echo chamber of alliance enthralled members poring over their naval theories, legal rationalizations, and institutional accolades, the tactics and policies promoted and adopted by the politicians, admirals and "diplomats" in Japan and the US become more extreme and inclined to take unwise risks staking out untenable positions.

Yoshihara's work is worthwhile to review because a presentation of the Chinese strategic perspective in English allows the US reader an unprecedented view of Chinese naval thinking without having to succumb to the author's "self referential" characterizations of Chinese bias. Some of the Chinese observations are sufficiently profound that they withstand the expert's criticisms quite well. Although definitely not his intention, it's almost as if, Yoshihara by publishing this report makes the Chinese case for them.