and international security experts have expressed concerns that it may just be a matter of time before China establishes an air defense identification zone over disputed waters in the South China Sea.
China has been rapidly reclaiming land and making artificial islands in the South China Sea during the past year, causing strong reaction in the U.S. and many other countries.
Senator John McCain, chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, said island building is just the beginning.
McCain said the next step for China will be to militarize those islands and declare an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the South China Sea to further its sovereignty claims.
“They build runways; they are going to put weapons there, and the next thing you will see the Chinese do is when an American aircraft [flies by], whether being a commercial craft or what, they will say ‘identify yourself’ – establishing an Air Defense Identification Zone, which then means territorial sovereignty,” McCain said last week at the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
Airspace zone
An Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) is airspace over land or water where the country establishing the zone asks an incoming aircraft to identify itself and have control over its flight path in the interest of national security. A zone extends beyond a country's airspace to give the country more time to respond to possibly hostile aircraft.
South Korea and Japan have set up ADIZs that extend well beyond their territorial airspace and overlap others. China established an ADIZ over the East China Sea in 2013.
Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, believed China may set up a similar ADIZ in the South China Sea, although China may hold back from doing so until after President Xi Jinping’s much anticipated visit to the U.S. in September.
“After that time, and after the U.S. goes into lock-down for the presidential campaign, it seems to me possible China might take this next step, aimed to consolidate its control in the region,” Jennings said recently at a conference hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, another Washington think tank.
Other scholars share similar concerns.
ADIZ likely
At a recent House of Representatives subcommittee hearing on America’s security role in the South China Sea, Andrew Erickson, a U.S. Naval War College professor, said he believed China will declare an ADIZ within two years.
Erickson said the facilities that China is building in the area includes a 3,000-meter-long runway on the reclaimed land on Fiery Cross Reef in the Spratly Islands.
The most logical application of this runway, he said, would be to support a Chinese ADIZ in the near future.