From:
http://cimsec.org/east-asian-security-age-chinese-mega-cutter/16974< Edited >
Sprinting to SuperiorityJust a few years ago, the idea of Chinese maritime predominance was pure fantasy. This is illustrated in a little-remembered confrontation between Japanese and Chinese forces that took place in 2002. In December of the previous year, the Japan Coast Guard sank an armed North Korean trawler operating near the Japanese coast, an encounter that Wikipedia grandiosely calls the Battle of Amami-Ōshima.
After hours of fight and flight, the trawler ultimately went down in Chinese jurisdictional waters. Japanese policymakers decided to raise the wreck, causing consternation among Chinese leaders. The operation would involve questions of Chinese rights and interests embodied within the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which China ratified six years earlier. In response, Chinese policymakers instructed the China Marine Surveillance (CMS), a maritime law enforcement agency, to deploy a task force of ships to monitor the Japanese operations.
The CMS task force was ordered to “maintain presence and show jurisdiction,” that is, to be present to remind the Japanese who had authority. But if the Chinese record is any guide, it was clear that the Japanese were in charge. According to the recollections of the CMS task force commander, Liu Zhendong, Japan created a security perimeter around the site, barring Chinese access to the salvage operations. It could do so because it was able to muster many more ships: as many as 19 vessels, while CMS could send at most four, cobbled together from units from all over the country. Moreover, Japan’s cutters were much larger than China’s. Among the ships buttressing Japan’s security perimeter was the 6,500 ton Shikishima (PLH-31)—the world’s largest coast guard ship. In the end, China was forced to resort to guile to gain access to the salvage operations: it accused a Japanese ship of leaking oil, a violation of China’s environmental protection laws.
In little more than a decade, the tables have completely turned. While Japan has a much more capable coast guard in many respects—it operates far more and better aircraft; its ships are more capable, their crews better trained—its white fleet is now much smaller than China’s, at the same time that the area of waters under its administration is far larger. And of course, with the commissioning of CCG 2901, China, not Japan, will own the world’s largest coast guard cutter.
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