China turned up the heat in its simmering dispute with Japan yesterday when for the first time it used a government aircraft to challenge Tokyo’s control of a contested island group.
Tokyo scrambled fighters and made a formal diplomatic protest after the Chinese maritime surveillance aircraft was spotted in the territorial airspace of the remote and uninhabited islands, which Tokyo calls the Senkaku but Beijing knows as the Diaoyu.
The flight, which the Japanese defence ministry said was the first violation of Japan’s airspace by a Chinese official aircraft since at least 1958, came just three days before a Japanese general election in which the Senkaku dispute is already a campaign issue.
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