Commander of the Chinese Navy, Admiral Wu Shengli (R), points out the layout of the Chinese Navy headquarters to visiting US Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson (L) during his visit to Beijing on July 18, 2016.
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Richardson said friendly exchanges with China’s navy are conditional on safe and professional interactions at sea. “It’s glaring”, Xinhua quoted Bruce Fein, a veteran constitutional and worldwide law attorney, as saying.
Beijing-based naval expert Li Jie said Fan’s visit indicated that the southern command could carry out joint combat operations of land, rocket, naval and air forces as well as other strategic support forces.
By unilaterally initiating an ill-grounded arbitration over the South China Sea, the Philippines exposed its desire to use the legal pretext as a political tool, Cui said, adding that the case flies in the face of the general practice that arbitration shall be premised on State consent.
Comparing the USA maneuvers of warships carrying out repeated operations in the adjacent waters of some Chinese islands and reefs on the excuse of exercising what Washington calls the “freedom of navigation”, to “preemptive attack”, Fein faulted the logic behind these operations. That has incensed China, which has responded by dispatching its own vessels to threaten and harass the US ships.
The US has been conducting such patrols close to Chinese-held islands and has complained that Chinese aircraft and ships have performed “unsafe” maneuvers in the area.
The Court went on to determine that, as some areas of the South China Sea are within the Philippines EEZ (measured from the main Philippine archipelago), Chinese activities had violated Philippine sovereign rights.
The visit, which has been in work for months, was Richardson’s first to China and his first in-person meeting with Wu.
On Tuesday, Fan ordered officers and others to “profoundly understand the complexity of the grim situation facing our nation’s security, step up all preparations for military struggle, ensure that orders are followed, and that we can get there and fight to win”. 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.
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China defines “relevant and irrelevant parties” to prevent countries “outside the region” like the United States and Japan, as described by Beijing, from interfering in the East Sea issue, he said.
