Biden in Beijing: Between the Moon and the East China Sea: The New Yorker Before Joe Biden arrived in Beijing this morning, as part of his tour of East Asia, the state-run People's Liberation Army Daily openly applauded an anonymous post on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, that criticized the U.S. as "an initiator of plots." The post called on every Chinese person to be on alert for "Western anti-China powers," because such forces could "take advantage of social instability to harm the Chinese people." It was a fitting welcome on a trip that has been tense from the start. For more than a week, China had been engaged in provocative games above the East China Sea, declaring an air-defense identification zone more than two hundred miles beyond its coast. As Chinese officials have been quick to point out, the demarcation of such zones by established nations is not uncommon. A unilateral determination of the zone, however, especially when said zone overlaps with zones of China's neighbors - in this case, three American allies: Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea - is less conventional. In response, Barack Obama sent two B-52 bombers on a "military exercise" through the area unannounced. Emboldened, Japan and South Korea quickly followed suit with their own aircraft. Shortly thereafter, China answered with fighter jets and a warning that it will not hesitate to take what it described as "emergency defensive actions" against those who do not comply. What's more, Beijing sandwiched the announcement of its new zone between a showcase of China's nuclear submarine fleet, earlier this October, and the launch of the Chang-E3 lunar probe, the third ever, behind ones sent by the U.S. and Russia, to make a soft landing on the moon. The mood was jubilant as state television continually looped footage of the rocket's takeoff. Echoing Mao's pronouncement, in 1949, celebrating the founding of the People's Republic, one microblogger proudly said, "The Chinese people have finally stood up ... on the moon!" Never mind, of course, that China's first manned mission won't be scheduled until sometime after 2020. What precipitated these gambits? An ostensible cause of the tensions is a small splattering of uninhibited islands - known as Senkaku by the Japanese and Diaoyu by the Chinese - to which both nations have laid fierce claim but which Japan currently administers. In counting the islands as part of its newly established zone, China is upping the ante. Sino-Japanese relations have been deteriorating steadily ever since Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda announced his government's decision, last year, to purchase three of the five islands in an unabashed effort to wrest complete control of the disputed territory. Since then, the two countries have, on multiple occasions, come perilously close to a military confrontation. In Tokyo on Tuesday, Biden engaged in some delicate diplomacy. While stating that China's establishment of the new zone is an effort to "unilaterally change the status quo in the East China Sea," raising "the risk of accidents and miscalculation," the Vice-President stopped short of condemning Beijing. Still, the China Daily, another state-run outlet, said that Washington was "turning a blind eye to Tokyo's provocations." But there are signs that Beijing's moves have as much to do with domestic concerns as foreign ones. China's new President, Xi Jinping, is well aware of the social stresses and anxieties - the restive downside of a dangerously overheated economy - that continually imperil the Party's hegemony. Social-media crackdowns and dissident arrests are at an all-time high. For the Chinese government, it sometimes seems, the greatest danger to internal stability is the absence of an external threat. Some commentators have called Xi's move a belligerent misstep that has made the world more dangerous than he anticipated, but it's unclear whether China is terribly concerned about consternation roused outside its borders. When throngs of Chinese citizens gathered to protest the Japanese purchase of the islands last year, the placards that many people held, to symbolize Chinese solidarity, prominently featured portraits of Mao. Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Chinese Republic, despairingly referred to his people as "nothing but a sheet of loose sand." For the government, an enemy makes for a good binding agent. By infuriating the Japanese and frustrating the Americans, Xi stands to lose little in the eyes of his people. More likely, these measures will have the added benefit of appeasing conservative hardliners and awakening fervent patriotism. China reaches for the moon and claims the air above the sea, but its leaders" eyes are, most of all, directed homeward. Photograph: Lintao Zhang/AFP/Getty