Japan yesterday accused a Chinese spy ship of entering its territorial waters as Tokyo conducted a joint exercise with the United States and India.
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The Chinese frigate did not enter Japan’s claimed territorial waters around the islands, which extend 12 nautical miles (22.2 km) from shore, but instead sailed into what is called the Contiguous Zone, which extends for 24 nautical miles.
USA defense officials said this type of incident has become routine as China continues to express ire over what it views as US provocations when sailing its vessels near Chinese man-made islands in the South China Sea that China considers its territory.
Lockheed P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft spotted the PLAN vessel – identified as a Type 815 Dongdiao-class intelligence ship – west of Kuchinoerabu Island in southern Japan at around 0330 h local time, said officials at Japan’s Ministry of Defense.
Japanese Defence Ministry officials declined to speculate why the 6,000-ton “information-gathering” vessel sailed into the area, but Mr Nakatani said China, as Japan’s neighbour, must act “carefully”.
Blocking China’s unfettered access to the Western Pacific are the 200 islands stretching from Japan’s main islands through the East China Sea to within 100 km (60 miles) of Taiwan.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said he was unaware of the situation, however.
It also continues to publish maps that include the “nine-dash line”, a series of marks around the sea that Beijing hasn’t fully explained, but has been implied as an expression of the nation’s claims.
Tensions over the Senkaku Islands, which the USA claimed after World War II and returned to Japan in 1972, have resulted in jets scrambled by both Japan and China, along with incidents of boat ramming. A strengthened three-way partnership among the U.S., Japan and India is “an important strategic shift”.
Finally, the Japanese response aside, the Chinese warship’s route may have inadvertently weakened China’s political claim to the islands.
Chinese officials have responded by claiming that they acted along the rights of worldwide maritime law.
Those operations were meant to challenge Chinese claims to territorial waters based off of those artificial islands.
However, Beijing has repeatedly protested when U.S. Navy ships in recent months have conducted innocent passages nearby Chinese-claimed artificial islands in the South China Sea.
A military vessel sailing within another nation’s territorial waters conforms with worldwide law if it conducts an “innocent passage”, which precludes weapons-related operations and intelligence gathering that would harm a state’s security capabilities.
While it may look like China was probing the Senkakus to escalate its dispute with Japan in the East China Sea, it actually revealed how weak its position in the dispute really is.
A U.S. Navy aircraft-carrier strike group along with warships from India and Japan jointly practiced anti-submarine warfare and air-defense and search-and-rescue drills in one of the largest and most complex exercises held by the three countries.
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The Association of Southeast Asian Nations Tuesday issued a tough statement on tensions in the South China Sea, only to retract it hours later.
