China called on the US to reduce and eventually halt air and sea military surveillance close to its shores after a series of territorial disputes this year.
The request was made during a special session on maritime safety between the two countries’ militaries on Wednesday and Thursday, Xinhua news agency said on Thursday, citing China’s Defense Ministry.
Five times this year, Chinese vessels have confronted US surveillance ships in Asian waters, the US Defense Department said in May. China said the US vessels had intruded into its territory. There has since been a sixth incident.
“China believes the constant US military air and sea surveillance and survey operations in China’s exclusive economic zone had led to military confrontations between the two sides,” the ministry said. “The way to resolve China-US maritime incidents is for the US to change its surveillance and survey operations policies against China, decrease and eventually stop such operations.”
Susan Stevenson, spokeswoman at the US embassy in Beijing, confirmed the request.
“Our position has not changed,” Stevenson said, citing a US Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy statement during a June visit to China that the US “exercises its freedom of navigation while putting emphasis on taking care to avoid any unwanted incidents.”
The US maintains on principle that waters beyond 19km offshore are open to all shipping, while China holds that the US should not trespass within its 322km exclusive economic zone.
In March, five Chinese vessels approached the USNS Impeccable in the South China Sea about 120km from Hainan Island, after hassling that ship, as well as the ocean surveillance ship Victorious in the Yellow Sea, in previous days.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS