The Communist Party summit that recast Xi Jinping as a reformer extraordinaire has produced its first foreign-policy initiative: poking Japan in the eye.
That seems to be the point of China's declaration of a vast "air-defense identification zone," in which Beijing has essentially claimed the airspace around disputed islands administered by Japan.
The provocation came just two weeks after the party called for a new national security council to coordinate military, domestic and intelligence operations in China. Political analysts who worried that the body might herald a deepening Asian Cold War weren't being entirely paranoid.