Tensions between the USA and China rose last month after the US conducted a freedom of navigation operation by sailing the USS Lassen, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, within 12 nautical miles of an island China has built on a previously semi-submerged reef. “Building and maintaining necessary military facilities, this is what is required for China’s national defence and for the protection of those islands and reefs”, vice foreign minister Liu Zhenmin told a press conference in Kuala Lumpur.
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The construction would also include military facilities to protect the atoll and nearby reefs, he said.
Beijing has never precisely defined its claims to the strategic waterway, through which about a third of all the world’s traded oil passes.
An arbitral tribunal in The Hague Tuesday heard some of the Philippines’ territorial claims over the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea in a hearing on Tuesday.
China’s construction work on its own islands and reefs in the South China Sea is something “we have to do” for the sake of improving living conditions for people there as well as better fulfillment of China’s global obligation, a senior Chinese diplomat said on Sunday.
The Chinese premier, meanwhile, pointed to the intervention of some countries outside the region, stating that the issue is in nobody’s interest.
Beijing continues to insist that there is no problem with freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.
The islands are also claimed by a number of other regional powers: Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei.
He said predominantly Islamic countries such as Malaysia have a duty to expose as lies the “ideology propagated by these extremists that is the cause of this sadistic violence”. The US and others have called on Beijing to halt those projects, saying they are destabilizing an increasingly militarized region.
China claims most of the South China Sea, through which more than $5 trillion of world trade transits every year.
Medvedev said “it is now clear we can only fight this threat by bringing our forces together and by working through such worldwide institutions as the United Nations”.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has thanked Myanmar President Thein Sein for steering his country in its transition to a “new democratic Myanmar”.
U.S. President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took a tougher stance on the issue, lashing out at the Chinese government for building military facilities in the area and claiming islands.
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The activities included a commemorative summit and the designating of 2016 as the year of education exchange between China and Asean.
