Third, the landing of a Chinese military plane on Yongshu Jiao demonstrated that China’s construction of South China Sea islands and reefs is conducive to better carrying out humanitarian rescue tasks.
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The United States Navy will keep an eye on Beijing’s activities in the disputed South China Sea by means of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) or ‘submarine drones’.
Vietnam also stakes claim to the island where China has been building a runway for more than a year by dredging sand up on to reefs and atolls in the Spratlys archipelago.
The workers were flown to Hainan Island, where they received medical treatment.
At the same time, China’s Defense Ministry said the country’s second-ranking general, Fan Changlong, led military commanders to the Spratly Islands to visit troops and observe construction work.
Lavrov voiced support for China last week saying any attempts to “internationalize” the South China Sea dispute must be stopped immediately.
Chinese Ministry spokesman Lu Kang defended land reclamation work in the Spratly Islands as within its territorial rights, and accused the G-7 of diverging from its mission of safeguarding the global economy.
Over $5 trillion of worldwide trade flows through the area every year, with the US bilateral trade alone contributing over $1 trillion of the total.
China’s Defence Ministry earlier dismissed US queries as to why China had used a military aircraft rather than a civilian one in Sunday’s evacuation from Fiery Cross Reef.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, called on China to clarify its intentions.
When asked about the end of the military exercises, dubbed Balikatan 2016, the U.S. official described the exercises as a good time to show Beijing that the United States was serious about freedom of navigation and that no decision has been made about the ownership of the disputed territories in the South China Sea.
The timing of the statement was particularly important, coming as it did weeks before an expected ruling by an arbitral tribunal of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on an action brought by the Philippines against China in 2013.
It also upset the USA administration when it became the first non-Asian country and the first member of the Group of Seven advanced economies to join a China-backed development bank for Asia seen by Washington as an unwelcome rival to Western-led institutions, such as the World Bank.
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When US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter landed aboard the USS John C. Stennis on Friday as it was conducting military exercises in the South China Sea, it was not simply to give his Philippine counterpart, Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin, a ringside seat at the war games.
