A Chinese military aircraft that briefly violated the airspace of neighboring Japan this week may have done so unintentionally, an official in Beijing suggested on Tuesday.
Lin Jian, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, told a regular press conference that both governments remained in contact through existing channels to discuss the event Tokyo had earlier described as "extremely regrettable."
"China has no intention of intruding into the airspace of any country," Lin said, without elaborating.
On Monday, Japan's Air Self-Defense Force jets scrambled from western air bases to intercept a Chinese air force Y-9 reconnaissance aircraft approaching from the East China Sea, the Japanese Defense Ministry said.
The Y-9, equipped to gather electronic intelligence on foreign military hardware, spent two minutes inside Japan's territorial airspace off the uninhabited Danjo Islands, part of Nagasaki prefecture, the ministry said.
It was the first time on record a Chinese military plane had breached Japanese airspace, although crewed and uncrewed Chinese government aircraft had done so in 2012 and 2017, respectively, including at the contested Senkaku islets, the statement said.
Yoshimasa Hayashi, Japan's chief cabinet secretary, said on Tuesday that the violation was "utterly unacceptable."
A Chinese embassy official in Tokyo was summoned for a formal protest, but Hayashi declined to go into detail about ongoing discussions with Beijing.
Japan has declared a vast air defense zone around its archipelagic territory—comprising more than 14,000 islands. The self-declared buffer is used to detect and identify foreign military aircraft.
By the end of the 2023 fiscal year ending March 31, the Japanese air force had scrambled nearly 700 times against Chinese and Russian craft operating in nearby international airspace, according to government data.
China and Japan have sought to reset their testy ties by leveraging the 50th anniversary of their formal diplomatic relationship in 2022. Below the surface, however, Beijing has little influence over Tokyo's decision to rearm and lean into its decades-old alliance with the U.S.
Rahm Emanuel, America's outspoken ambassador in Tokyo, took aim at Beijing for this week's airspace breach.
"There's little 'love thy neighbor' in China's 'good neighbor' policy. A Chinese surveillance plane recently violating Japanese airspace, Chinese coast guard cutters repeatedly ramming and firing water cannons at Philippine ships, and a Chinese fighter dropping flares at an Australian helicopter tell the true story," he said in an X post on Tuesday.
"More backyard bullying and badgering than barbecues and ballgames," Emanuel said.
The Chinese Defense Ministry did not return a request for comment.
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