China’s maritime safety administration said yesterday it would bar access to an area off the east coast of Hainan island for a three-day military exercise ending on Thursday.
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The statement provided details of the closing but did not specify the type of exercises or the reason behind the drills.
Dozens of Vietnamese who gathered for an anti-China protest in central Hanoi were taken away by authorities yesterday as they tried to rally support for an global tribunal’s ruling rejecting Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea.
The survey, which polled 1,200 adults nationwide and has a margin of error of ±3 percentage points, was conducted about two weeks before the Arbitral Tribunal in The Hague ruled on July 12 in favor of the Philippines against China.
Several nations-including Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam-claim territory in the South China Sea.
The tour of the Liaoning offered a chance to show to the United States “the speed and progress of China’s military development” Li Jie, a Beijing-based naval expert, said.
Yuan Peng, vice-president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, warned that China-US ties are “now dominated and encumbered by a single problem – the South China Sea issue”.
“How much defensive facilities we need will depend on the level of threat we face”.
Yasay said Yi had proposed bilateral talks but only on issues “outside, or (in) disregard of, the arbitral ruling”, which he declined because it was not in the Philippines’ national interests.
Reaffirming its claim of territorial sovereignty and maritime rights over nearly all of the South China Sea, particularly the disputed Spratly Islands, China says its claim is rooted in history.
China is the biggest beneficiary of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and won’t let anybody damage it, Sun said.
He expected the United States to resume freedom of navigation operations after Richardson’s visit.
During a meeting between top Chinese and U.S. naval officials on Monday, Beijing remained defiant, asserting its right to continue controversial construction projects in the Spratly Islands, which are claimed by several countries in the region.
“They said that if you will insist on the ruling and discussing it along those lines, then we might be headed for a confrontation”, he said.
China has refused to recognise last week’s ruling by an arbitration court in The Hague, which invalidated its vast claims in the South China Sea.
“China can return to the path of putting aside differences in the name of joint exploration”, Zheng said.
The ruling, which was welcomed by the US and other countries, invalidated China’s sprawling territorial claims under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas, regarded as the constitution governing the use of the world’s oceans.
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De Borja says long simmering tensions with China over territorial boundaries came to a head in 2012, when the Philippine Coast Guard intercepted a Chinese fishing vessel near Scarborough Shoal not far from Subic Bay, the sprawling former US Naval Base.
