In 2001, a collision between a Chinese fighter jet and a US surveillance plane in which the Chinese pilot was killed and the American crew detained on Hainan led to a crisis in U.S.
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Zhang Baohui, a security expert at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University, said he believed the encounter highlighted the limitation of CUES, and shows that Chinese pilots would still fly close to U.S. surveillance planes if needed.
The U.S. Defense Department described an “unsafe” meeting between a U.S. military airplane and two Chinese fighter jets.
“Over the past year, DoD has seen improvements in PRC actions, flying in a safe and professional manner”, Davis said. “We demand that the USA immediately cease this type of close reconnaissance and prevent this sort of incident from happening again”.
In a statement sent to the Global Times tabloid, the Chinese Defence Ministry yesterday said it was looking into reports of the encounter, which mirrored an incident in August 2014 when a Chinese fighter pilot flew around a United States spy plane.
Only last week, China scrambled fighter jets after a US Navy ship sailed close to a disputed reef in the busy waters. China has rejected the accusations and called on the United States to stop spying near its territory.
“The American claims are not factual”, Hong said to gathered reporters.
Kerry said he wanted China to end its militarization of the contested islands in the South China Sea.
In the eyes of China, it is the United States that is the aggressor, interfering in a region relatively close to the shores of the Chinese mainland, yet far from U.S. soil.
Taiwan, Vietnam, and Malaysia have also claimed portions of these islands, The U.S. Seventh Fleet had such a lengthy presence in the Gulf of Tonkin, an arm of the South China Sea, during the long Vietnam War, that the fleet was humorous tnicknamed “The Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club”.
Frequent reconnaissance missions by U.S. Navy vessels’ aircraft off the Chinese coast jeopardize China’s sea and air safety, Hong said. The close encounter of Chinese fighter jets with our surveillance plane can only be viewed as an example of China’s increasingly bold attempts to provoke the United States into an worldwide confrontation – if not military, then diplomatic.
“This is exactly the type of irresponsible and unsafe intercepts that the air-to-air annex to CUES is supposed to prevent”, said Greg Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank. “We can’t read too much into one incident”, he added.
U.S. fighter jets stand by at the upper deck of a USS George Washington aircraft carrier while a U.S. Cowpens ship passes by the South China Sea, Sept. 3, 2010.
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“This is an area where we have not had really a significant number of issues like this since some of the confidence-building measures over the last few months”, Cook said.
