The cruises will be managed by Dalian-based COSCO Shipping Ferry Co Ltd. Dream of the South China Sea will travel from Sanya to the Yongle Island, part of the Xisha Islands in Hainan province within this month.
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In a rare revelation, the weapons were shown on state television in the wake of a landmark worldwide tribunal rejecting Beijing’s claims to nearly all of the South China Sea.
A KFC employee surnamed Lei in Chenzhou, Hunan province, confirmed there had been a small protest outside the restaurant on Monday.
Last week, an arbitration tribunal in The Hague, which lacked any enforcement power, rejected China’s claims to economic rights across large swathes of the South China Sea, ruling in favor of the Philippines.
Meanwhile, a campaign of smashing iPhones has taken off on social media, in protest against US tech giant Apple.
KFC and Apple “are just closely associated with the US, and you are seeing people picking the closest symbol they can think of to demonstrate against”, he said.
The protests are a reminder of the political risks for global brands in China, where they regularly become targets of nationalist sentiment, often stirred up by official media.
China’s leadership has tried to tamp down this week’s protests with demands in state media to leave foreign companies and their customers alone.
According to Beijing News, Huaian police said that those who are expressing their patriotism deserve to be recognised but they should not cross the legal border and should not do things that are too extreme.
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China’s government has generally avoided making direct comments about the election, wary of being seen to interfere, though in April Chinese Finance Minister Lou Jiwei called Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump an “irrational type” due to his tariffs proposal on imported Chinese goods. He said it also told protesters to boycott Japanese and Korean goods. The protests have been criticised by the police and public. The Tribunal concluded that there is no legal basis for China’s stipulations on historic rights to the resources within its “nine-dash line”.[2] It argued that to the extent China may have had any such rights in the past, these were extinguished by the enactment of UNCLOS and its system of allocating maritime zones.
