The Chinese Foreign Ministry described the peaceful passage through the region as an action that “again proves that China’s construction of defensive facilities on the relevant reefs in the Nansha Islands is completely reasonable and totally necessary”.
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USS William P Lawrence, a guided missile destroyer, illegally entered China’s waters near the islands today without the permission of the Chinese government, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang said.
China claims nearly all of South China Sea which is disputed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.
According to a press release from the Defense Ministry later on Tuesday afternoon, two J-11 fighter jets and a Y-8 naval patrol plane flew over the waters on patrol.
China claims about 90 percent of the South China Sea based on what it deems historical rights. About $1.2 trillion in USA trade passes through the sea annually, according to US government figures.
THE United States sent a guided missile destroyer on a freedom of navigation operation near Kagitingan Reef in the South China Sea even as a Taiwanese group of lawyers filed a motion for intervention involving the country’s arbitration case against China. The sail-by indicates that the US will continue challenging Chinese territorial claims with naval and air excursions.
Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to which China and Vietnam are party and the U.S.is not, a nation can extend its territorial seas to 12 nautical miles off its shores.
Fiery Cross Reef in September 2015.
ASEAN has struggled to present a united front on the South China Sea issue.
As well as reviewing several hundred pages of evidence from Taiwan, the judges have also sought further information from the Philippines and China, legal sources close to the case say. The installation is one of more than a half-dozen Chinese-developed islands in the disputed Spratly Islands.
The court is expected to hand down a verdict in the coming weeks, and it is widely expected to go against China.
PHILIPPINES president-elect Rodrigo Duterte is willing to talk with China over a highly sensitive territorial dispute in the South China Sea, his spokesman said yesterday, in a significant reversal of the incumbent’s stance.
The U.S. operation was carried out to demonstrate the right of freedom of navigation, the Pentagon said.
The U.S. refuses to back a claimant to the territory, but maintains an economic interest in the region, with more than $5 trillion in global trade passing through the South China Sea each year. Under a military pact signed between the United States and the Philippines, U.S. forces are set, in effect, to start stationing some troops in the Philippines.
A Chinese diplomat warned last week that criticism of China over the South China Sea would rebound like a coiled spring.
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China has added more than 3,000 acres of land to its South China Sea island holdings by expanding existing islands or creating new ones by piling sand atop coral reefs.
