It is only one satellite image. It is black and white. At its centre is a pixelated splotch, a chalky smudge against the blackness of the waves. The splotch may be a piece of the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner, but the image quality is poor – perhaps deliberately blurred – and offers little in the way of anything concrete.
But it does offer something immensely revealing: incontrovertible proof that China's fast-growing space presence not only exists, but is effective.
Families anxious to discover the fate of the 239 people on board flight 370 have been tossed about in the past two weeks by a confusing pastiche of information. But there has been no confusing China's increasingly muscular military ability, which has emerged in Beijing's push to find a plane two-thirds filled by Chinese citizens.
China has devoted to the task 20 satellites, numerous aircraft – two now flying from Australia on search missions – and a fleet of ships, the first of which will arrive in the distant south Indian Ocean search quadrant on Tuesday. In those efforts, it has offered a rare look into what it is capable of, after years of double-digit military budget increases that will see it spend $146-billion this year.
The satellite image is perhaps the most concrete example.
That China is populating space is no secret – it now has 116 operational satellites, a hair below Russia's 118 (the U.S. has 502). But until now, "we just didn't have any evidence" of their functionality, said James Hardy, Asia-Pacific editor of IHS Jane's Defence Weekly.
"It's interesting to see it being used and proven to be useful, because there's a lot of noise about what China can do," he said. That single black and white image offers "proof that Chinese systems are working to the level that they want."
(The conspicuous lack of U.S. military satellite imagery has led some to speculate that American war planners are deliberately stepping back to watch what China reveals through its response. That belief, however, represents a particularly dim view of U.S. willingness to hold back information critical to resolving a potential humanitarian disaster.)
Similarly, the naval presence in the search underscores what China has achieved in building a navy that now, according to Jane's, numbers 255,000 people, four or five nuclear-armed submarines, 52 conventional attack submarines, 22 destroyers, 55 frigates, nine corvettes and a swarm of 254 smaller fast-attack craft. It's growing rapidly: Just last fall, China launched a new class of Type 52D guided-missile destroyer that Mr. Hardy called "a very impressive ship."
Having some of that military might on display, particularly in the context of an aviation mystery that has captured global attention, is likely to leave some unsettled.
Though it's unlikely to surprise military strategists, for people in Japan, "who are some of the most worried people about China's military capabilities, this a bit of a wake-up call," said Jeff Kingston, a professor of Asian Studies at Temple University in Tokyo. For "the general public, there is a growing recognition that China has very much modernized its capabilities."
At the same time, there is some hope – albeit faint – that the international element to the search will help to ease some of the tensions in the region. Japan had none of its own citizens on board the flight. Yet it now has two sophisticated military aircraft flying not far from Antarctica in search of a passenger plane filled with Chinese. The Japanese aircraft are working in co-ordination with China's own military planes.
The past few months have seen a worrisome escalation in tension on the water and in the air between China and Japan. The missing plane offers a chance for the two sides to work together.
"We're seeing a level of collaboration that's pretty much unprecedented," John Blaxland, an expert on Asia-Pacific defence and security issues at Australian National University, told the L.A. Times.
Gregory Noble, a professor with the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo, called himself "modestly hopeful" that co-operation in the south Indian Ocean could pay dividends elsewhere.
"It helps to have an external 'enemy' that unites everyone in a common mission of finding out what happened and figuring out what if anything can be done to minimize the chance of recurrence," he said in an e-mail.
He added: "Perhaps some good can be derived from this (likely) tragedy."
Nathan VanderKlippe