Lt. Col. Michelle Baldanza, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Defense, confirmed on Wednesday to NBC News that “two tactical aircraft from the People’s Republic of China” had attempted a risky intercept against the U.S. patrol aircraft, coming with 50 feet.
Advertisement
Last week, China said U.S. Navy patrols in the South China Sea require it to increase the defense capabilities of the islands it controls in the area.
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 U.S. spy plane. The U.S. plane was on a routine mission in worldwide airspace.
China urged the United States on Thursday to “immediately stop close-in reconnaissance actions” after confirming that a US Navy EP-3 spy plane had conducted close-in flights near China’s Hainan Island on Tuesday.
The intercept occurred days before President Barack Obama travels to parts of Asia from May 21-28, including a Group of Seven summit in Japan and his first trip to Vietnam.
China claims sovereignty over all of the South China Sea while the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have counter claims.
“American military vessels and aircraft frequently engage in surveillance in close proximity to China’s coastal waters, and this constitutes a grave threat to China’s security on land and sea”, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, said during a scheduled press briefing in Beijing.
“If this happens again next week, and then the week after that, it would signal a return to a more tactically aggressive phase in China’s attempts to get the U.S.to back off”, Ashley Townshend, a visiting fellow at the Asia-Pacific Center at Fudan University, Shanghai, told Bloomberg.
Following a visit to China on May 17, 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry reaffirmed that the US government will not take sides in the dispute.
Mr. Hong, the Chinese spokesman, said Tuesday’s encounter took place near the island province of Hainan, just off the mainland’s south coast.
China’s official Xinhua news agency accused Washington of “flexing its military muscle at China’s doormat”. “Two Chinese aircraft followed and monitored the U.S. plane in accordance with the law and kept safe distance from the USA plane and did not make any unsafe moves”, Hong said. However, the American aircraft was only released a few months later, disassembled and packed onto a Russian plane.
China claims most of the contested sea and has built artificial islands there with military installations to defend its claim.
Advertisement
“The problem isn’t, ‘Are you talking?’ The problem is this kind of behavior, this very unsafe and risky behavior in the air which puts people’s lives at risk unnecessarily”, he told reporters in Washington.
