Zhang Yesui, China’s deputy foreign minister, told Ambassador Max Baucus that the United States should cease “threatening Chinese sovereignty and security interests”, The New York Times reported.
Advertisement
Lu Kang, the spokesman, added that Beijing would “resolutely respond to any country’s deliberately provocative actions” and that the ship had been “tracked and warned” while on the mission to deliberately enter the disputed waters. China has previously said that if the USA continues on this path… military confrontation will start sooner or later.
“China strongly urges the USA side to conscientiously handle China’s serious representations [and] immediately correct its mistake”, said a statement from China’s Ministry of Defence, which gave no indication of what, exactly, it expected the United States to do.
Tuesday’s operations were “not directed at any specific country”, the USA official said. The sail-by was “long overdue”, said Bonnie Glaser, a senior China expert at CSIS, adding that the exercises “should be done quietly, regularly, and often”. “It’s not something that’s unique to China”.
He said that China was building in the South China Sea for the “public good”.
Washington has repeatedly said it does not recognise Chinese claims to territorial waters around the artificial islands. About 30 per cent of global trade passes through the South China Sea, which also has rich fishing grounds and a potential wealth of undersea mineral deposits. The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan also have overlapping claims, and several of them also occupy different islands, reefs and rocks.
And yet when the United States tested this thesis on Tuesday, by sailing a guided missile destroyer close to one of those islands, China barely raised a murmur. To defend the US Navy’s freedom of navigation as well as the American influence in the Asia-Pacific, Obama chose to make a compromise with the Pentagon, said the report.
Basically, China needs to share. “It’s controversial, but China seems dead set on this policy”, says Winn.
Philippines, which has filed an arbitration case with the United Nations questioning China’s sweeping claims over the sea, led U.S. allies in the region in hailing the warship’s passage through the disputed waters.
Xi made it clear in late September after a meeting with Obama in Washington that China had no intention of militarizing the islands in the South China Sea.
Both Subi and Mischief Reefs were submerged at high tide before China began a massive dredging project to turn them into islands in 2014.
Satellite image of airstrip construction on the Fiery Cross reef in the South China Sea.
The naval maneuver came a month after China’s president, Xi Jinping, and Obama met in Washington and failed to reach an agreement on China’s claims.
Despite those tensions, exchanges between the two militaries have continued to expand, with a US Navy delegation paying visits last week to China’s sole aircraft carrier and a submarine warfare academy.
“Underwater features can not generate territorial seas, and Subi Reef was indisputably underwater before China built an artificial island on it. Artificial islands are only entitled to a 500-meter safety zone”.
Advertisement
The risk is that a greater presence of military planes and ships sparks a clash, however unintended, analysts said.
