The Japan Coast Guard said at least two of the 13 Chinese vessels have entered Japanese territorial waters around the islands despite repeated warnings for them to leave.
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When President Xi Jinping of China visited President Barack Obama at the White House last September, he startled many with reassuring words about his intentions for the Spratly Islands, a contested area where the Chinese government has been piling dredged sand and concrete atop reefs for the past few years and building housing and runways on them.
New satellite images appear to show reinforced aircraft hangers built on three islands in the disputed South China Sea, Reuters reports.
“They are far thicker than you would build for any civilian goal”, Gregory B. Poling, director of the center’s Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, said Monday in a telephone interview, “They’re reinforced to take a strike”.
Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida called in Chinese ambassador Cheng Yonghua for the second time since Friday and told him that China was trying to change the status quo unilaterally, a Japanese foreign ministry statement said.
China reacted angrily to the verdict, with Xinhua, the country’s official news agency, slamming what it described as an “ill-founded” ruling, declaring the decision “null and void”.
Amid these aggressive maritime actions by China, Japan warned that bilateral relations were deteriorating after dozens of Chinese vessels sailed into the disputed waters of the East China Sea over the weekend.
Current Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has asked the 88-year-old Ramos to act as his special envoy to pave the way for talks with Beijing after an global arbitration tribunal invalidated China’s expansive territorial claims in a case put forward by the Philippines.
Fravel said the hangars are not necessarily inconsistent with the Chinese president’s assertions.
Japan has cranked up assistance recently to two countries who have territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Kishida told Cheng the environment surrounding Sino-Japanese ties was “deteriorating markedly”, the ministry said.
Were China to move forward on possible plans to deploy military aircraft to its facilities in the Spratlys, it would essentially complete construction of China’s unsinkable aircraft carriers in this area, and give China greater control over the highly-desirable South China Sea “strategic triangle” created by the Paracels, the Scarborough Shoal, and the Spratlys. “They’re reinforced to take a strike”.
Meanwhile, Japan protested Tuesday over a marked increase in the number of Chinese coast guard and fishing vessels in waters near disputed islands in the East China Sea.
China has repeatedly denied doing so and has in turn criticized US patrols and exercises for ramping up tensions.
“China has indisputable sovereignty over the Spratly islands and nearby waters”, China’s Defence Ministry said in a response to a request for comment on Tuesday. Gun batteries were seen on several of the ships, officials said.
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On July 12, an arbitration court in the Hague ruled that China had no historic title over the busy waterway and had breached the Philippines’ sovereign rights there, infuriating China, which had dismissed the case.
