With Japan’s new leader refusing to back down from China’s show of force and claims on Taiwan, Xi Jinping picks up the phone to try to pry the U.S.-Japan alliance apart.

Tokyo’s efforts to boost its naval power could ‘definitely complicate’ the strategic picture, military analysts have said.

China fiercely objects to what it sees as any outside interference on self-ruled Taiwan, which it claims as its own.

Rattled by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s stance on Taiwan, Chinese state media have called for nuclear bombs to be dropped on Japan that would render the nation deindustrialised and demilitarised for decades.

China is the real regional "troublemaker", a senior Taiwanese security official said on Friday, personally giving out copies of a new civil defence handbook the government is sending to every household on the island as China tensions rise.

That role also means a war over Taiwan could be "cataclysmic," the report warned, potentially "wiping out as much as 10 percent of global GDP"—an unprecedented economic hit in modern times. The authors said the ramifications of such a scenario could be "on par with the 2008 Global Financial Crisis."