China is courting, and confronting, US allies made uneasy by Trump

When China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, met with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts in Tokyo last weekend, he said China saw “great potential” for trade and stability if the three neighbours worked together. Citing what he called their shared “Oriental wisdom,” he quoted a proverb, seemingly alluding to the United States as an unreliable, distant ally: “Close neighbors are better than relatives far away.”

But even as the officials were talking, two Chinese coast guard ships had begun an unusual incursion into waters near disputed islands in the East China Sea. Japan’s coast guard, which moved to intercept them, said the Chinese ships were armed and had been pursuing a small Japanese fishing boat.

Japan said the incursion, which lasted nearly four days, was China’s longest yet into the waters around the islands, which are claimed by both countries. Japan’s foreign minister said he had protested to Wang on Saturday about an increase in such activity around the uninhabited islands, which Japan calls the Senkaku and China calls the Diaoyu.

China’s simultaneous pledges of friendship and deployment of armed ships reflect the two sides of Beijing’s strategy for dealing with a Trump administration that is rapidly recalibrating America’s place in the world.

China is using a “carrots and sticks” approach with its neighbours, to “reward the policies of the target country that advantage Chinese interests and warn against those policies that are harmful to China,” said Bonnie S Glaser, the managing director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the German Marshall Fund, a Washington-based research institution.

On the one hand, as Trump alienates allies of the United States, including by imposing tariffs and, in Japan’s case, questioning the fairness of a defense treaty, China sees an opportunity to court those countries.

On the other hand, China seems to have concluded that Trump’s abrasive foreign policy gives it leverage to advance its interests when so many US allies are feeling vulnerable and questioning America’s reliability.

“China sees Trump’s alienation of US allies as providing an opportunity, but that doesn’t mean that Beijing will refrain from signaling their dissatisfaction when China’s core interests are being threatened,” Glaser said.

That seems to be the case with Australia, which has had, at times, a tumultuous relationship with China. After Prime Minister Anthony Albanese took office in 2022, he moved to repair the relationship. Since then, China has lifted restrictions on a range of Australian exports, including wine, red meat and lobster. Last month, Chinese and Australian defense officials held high-level talks in Beijing for the first time in six years.

But just days later, a Chinese naval flotilla began circumnavigating Australia, unannounced. It conducted a live-fire drill in the area for the first time, forcing dozens of civilian flights to reroute.

The exercises set off alarm in Australia and calls to reevaluate its defenses. Some analysts said the drills were probably a response to the Australian navy’s frequent voyages in the South China Sea, over which China claims sovereignty. Others said China could have been testing how the Trump administration would react to shows of force so close to one of America’s most trusted allies.

“Beijing may be trying to see what it can get away with,” hoping to establish a new norm for its operations in the region, said Ja Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore. “I suppose one calculation is that if the United States is ineffective or paralyzed, the other actors are unable to do much on their own.”

China has taken a similar hard-and-soft approach with South Korea and Vietnam. Its trade with Vietnam is flourishing, and it has indicated that it might soon lift an unofficial ban on K-pop entertainment from South Korea.

But China held live-fire drills in the Gulf of Tonkin last month after Vietnam pressed territorial claims in those waters. And it deployed its coast guard near South Korea last week after a Korean vessel tried to inspect Chinese-built steel structures in the area. (South Korea lodged an official protest with Beijing over that incident.)

Such assertive behavior is a reminder that despite the changing geopolitical currents, China remains committed to one of its primary goals, which is to become the dominant power in the Asia-Pacific region, said Richard McGregor, a senior fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute, a foreign policy think tank in Sydney.

“The waters near Japan, in the South China Sea and around Australia are all in a way parts of an indivisible theater of Chinese interests,” he said. “They are going to pursue those goals whatever the ups and downs with the US are. The Chinese also calculate they can do both at the same time. They are embracing while fighting.”

Japan’s relationship with China embodies those contradictions.

The two countries’ ties have thawed in recent months. In January, the Chinese Communist Party’s diplomatic arm held talks with Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party for the first time in years. Both nations have loosened visa rules for each other’s tourists, and China has muted its objections to Japan’s release of treated radioactive water from the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Yet tensions persist. This month, Japan said it was considering putting long-range missiles on its southwestern island of Kyushu. Those missiles could target China’s forces if it tried to invade Taiwan, the de facto independent island claimed by Beijing.

Meanwhile, Japan says China has been sending more and more ships into waters near the Senkaku islands, which Japan controls, in what Japanese analysts call a strategy to slowly ratchet up challenges to the status quo.

The latest incursion started before dawn last Friday, when two Chinese coast guard ships entered territorial waters around the islet of Minamikojima, apparently chasing a much smaller Japanese fishing boat. Japan’s coast guard said it sent ships to head off the Chinese vessels.

The Japanese ships protected the fishing boat while demanding that the Chinese withdraw. The Chinese refused, beginning a 92-hour standoff in which the ships sailed side by side, each crew shouting claims to the islands at the other. At one point, two more Chinese ships briefly joined the fray.

Japan’s coast guard said it finally “forced the Chinese coast guard ships to withdraw” late Monday evening. It said China’s longest previous incursion, in 2023, had lasted almost 81 hours.

A former Japanese coast guard commander, Atsushi Tohyama, called the recent incursion part of a strategy of attrition that began in 2010, when a Chinese fishing trawler rammed a Japanese coast guard ship near the disputed islands.

“They appear to have been provoked by the fishing boat,” Tohyama said of the Chinese ships involved in the latest standoff. “From what I’ve been told, the fishing boat stayed in waters around the island longer than usual, and the Chinese retaliated in kind.”

“In a dispute like this, even the act of fishing becomes a declaration of sovereignty,” Tohyama said.