The history of air defense identification zones in Northeast Asia

Posted on : 2013-11-27 16:31 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
The line is a remnant of the Cold War, drawn by the US in 1951

By Gil Yun-hyung, Tokyo correspondent

South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan were the countries most directly influenced by the Chinese Defense Ministry’s Nov. 23 announcement of its air defense identification zone in the East China Sea. So why was it the US that responded most keenly to it?

The simple reason is that it was the US that drew the boundaries in the first place, part of an attempt to put itself at the center of a new international order in the Asia-Pacific region during the Cold War. China’s declaration is significant as the first real challenge to this order, which has prevailed in the region for close to seven decades.

The Korea Air Defense Identification Zone (KADIZ) was set on March 22, 1951, at the height of the Korean War. It was drawn by the Fifth Air Force, which is still the main presence in the US air power stationed in South Korea and Japan. The decision was made in order to guard against Soviet-made MIG-15s and other Chinese aircraft after the country launched into full-scale combat, turning the tide of the conflict.

The US military’s aim in drawing the limits of KADIZ in the West (Yellow) Sea is evident in the fact that it stops not midway between South Korea and China, but just beyond China’s Shandong Peninsula. For more than 60 years since, the South Korean Air Force has maintained the line more or less as is.

Japan also maintains much the same air defense identification zone that the American General Headquarters (GHQ) drew during the US postwar occupation. It too projects close to Russia’s Primorsky Krai region - part of a Cold War-era attempt to closely monitor the Soviet Far East. To avoid provoking the Soviet Union, however, the US did not include in it the four southernmost of the Kuril Islands (called the “Northern Territories” by Japan), which the Soviet Union occupied and took control of in the later stages of World War II.

Eventually, on Sept. 1, 1969, the Japan government created a legal basis for the US-drawn air defense identification zone with its Ministry of Defense Order No. 36.

Drawn up to suit the US’s military needs, the lines of the South Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese air defense identification zones are intricately designed not to overlap, giving each of the three countries a role in monitoring the Soviet Far East and coastal mainland China. The situation is very different from places like Dokdo (called Takeshima in Japan) and the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, where intermediate (and provisional) waters were defined broadly because of territorial disputes.

The result has been ongoing complaints from all three countries, which believe the currently defined zones do not reflect their own territorial claims.

Japan has been most disgruntled of all, since the zones leave out the four southernmost Kurils and Dokdo, all of which it claims as its own. Members of the Japanese Diet have missed no opportunity to point this out. During a meeting of the House of Councilors Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defense in August 2012, Liberal Democratic Party member Takashi Uto complained about Dokdo being left out of the zone and demanded that action be taken. Some observers have pointed to the zone as one of the factors that allowed South Korea to ratchet up its control over Dokdo with the “Rhee Syngman line” (peace line) created by the then-South Korean President’s No. 14 Cabinet order on Jan. 18, 1952 - a presidential declaration of sovereignty over surrounding waters.

More interesting still is the fact that about one-third of Yonakuni, an island at the southern end of Okinawa, was included in the Taiwanese air defense identification zone for close to forty years even after Okinawa was returned to Japan in May 1972.

Japan’s Sankei Shimbun newspaper blamed the omission on the US setting 123 degrees east longitude as the western boundary of the Japanese zone “while ignoring the existence of Yonakuni.”

The Japanese government’s first steps to fix the situation came in June 2010, around the same time frictions with China and Taiwan over the Senkaku Islands were beginning to heat up. Predictably, the Taiwanese government said it could not accept the change. Now, many in South Korea are calling for the extension of KADIZ to include Ieo Island.

China has indicated that it does not plan to passively accept the US and Japanese objections, affirming that it has no plans of withdrawing its declaration.

On Nov. 25, Yang Yujun, a spokesman for China’s Defense Ministry, said Japan had decided its air defense zone in the late 1960s and had “no right to say anything about China setting its own air defense identification zone.”

“The US shouldn’t be giving any mistaken signals that stir up Japan’s adventurous side, either,” Yang added.

 

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