Japan’s latest defence white paper again describes China as its greatest strategic challenge ever, according to reporting on the 598-page document, drawing a swift rejection from Beijing and underlining the depth of the security divide between the two Asian powers.
China’s state news agency Xinhua said the white paper continued to label China as Japan’s greatest strategic challenge, making what it described as unwarranted criticisms and deliberately hyping up China’s routine military activities and legitimate national defence development.
Beijing accused Tokyo of distorting the Chinese military’s necessary actions to safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Chinese government’s position is that its military activities in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the broader Pacific are lawful exercises of sovereignty and routine defence posture, not the escalatory expansion that Tokyo’s white paper describes.
Taiwan at the centre of the divide
The Taiwan dimension sharpens the disagreement further. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has stated that Japan could deploy its Self-Defence Forces if a Chinese attack on Taiwan also threatened Japan’s survival, according to reporting. Beijing reacted furiously to that remark, demanding a retraction that has not come.
The 2026 white paper’s treatment of Taiwan Strait security as existential to Japan’s economy effectively reinforces that earlier position within the formal framework of Japan’s published defence policy, according to analysis of the document.
Japan and its allies, most notably the United States and Australia, view the same military shift as a destabilising threat to a rules-based regional order. China views it as the natural consequence of its economic and military development.
A wider regional pattern
The white paper debate comes as Chinese naval activity draws close attention. Defence News reported on October 23 that China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, had launched and recovered aircraft in Japan’s maritime exclusive economic zone during a deployment, with fighter aircraft seen taking off and landing about 250 kilometres south of Japan’s Ishigaki Island.
Tokyo, which disputes a group of uninhabited islets with Beijing, said it had seen the carrier activity, while Xinhua said the Liaoning’s movements in October comply with international law and are not directed at any specific country or target.
The carrier deployment began shortly before the Keen Sword 27 United States-Japan military exercises, launched on October 19, which include the Philippines among other nations. For Tokyo, the sequence fits a pattern of growing Chinese reach. For Beijing, it is routine activity in its own maritime neighbourhood. That gap in interpretation is now the central fact of Japan-China security relations.
