TOKYO – China has completed at least one new drilling platform in the East China Sea and may already be tapping into hotly contested natural gas and oil fields, escalating a dispute with Japan over the rights to billions of dollars worth of underwater energy reserves, according to Japanese reconnaissance data.
The Chinese action, Japanese officials charge, has aggravated a potential flash point in East Asia even as diplomatic relations between Tokyo and Beijing languish.
The increasingly uneasy relationship between East Asia’s two dominant countries also includes territorial disputes and a heated row over Japan’s perceived lack of repentance for World War II-era aggression.
China is rapidly growing into an economic superpower and is hungry for sources of energy and raw materials. Economic ties have grown tremendously between the two nations in recent years, but they remain in fierce regional competition.
Japan has grown so alarmed by China’s activities in the East China Sea that it dispatched two envoys to Washington, D.C., this month to brief Bush administration and State Department officials on what authorities here described as a “major threat to Japanese sovereignty.”
Official surveys say the disputed fields contain an estimated 7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and up to 100 billion barrels of oil.
Officials in Tokyo said Japanese reconnaissance aircraft in September detected flames atop a stack on a Chinese drilling platform – an indication it is functional and may have started gas or oil extraction. The platform had been under construction for two years but did not function while Japan and China wrangled over drilling rights in the area, about halfway between Shanghai and Okinawa.
A second Chinese drilling platform in the area also appears nearly complete, officials said, and Japan has detected signs that China’s state oil company is close to finishing a pipeline to the platforms that would connect them to the Chinese mainland.
Twice in the past six weeks, Japanese officials said, they have detected five warships dispatched by China “in a show of force” near the drilling sites. Beijing has said the ships were merely conducting “ordinary exercises” in the region.
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