Canadian Minister of National Defence Bill Blair on Friday slammed Chinese fighter jets’ second “significantly unsafe” intercept in two weeks of Canadian aircraft patrolling the Pacific Ocean.
Blair told a news conference in Ottawa that a Chinese fighter jet on Sunday last week twice flew close to a Canadian Cyclone helicopter near the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島) in the South China Sea, and on the second flyby fired flares “directly in front” of the helicopter.
There was “little separation” between the fighter jet and the helicopter, he said.
“The actions of the People’s Republic of China fighter jet were deemed to be significantly unsafe, and we’ll express our concerns to the People’s Republic of China about that,” he said.
The helicopter and HMCS Ottawa were in the South China Sea as part of US and allied “freedom of navigation” crossings to reinforce the status of the body as an international waterway.
Beijing claims almost the entire South China Sea, through which trillions of dollars in trade passes annually, and has ignored an international court ruling that its assertion has no legal basis.
China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea through deploying hundreds of vessels and aircraft to the area, which has led to recent clashes with Philippine and Vietnamese ships, has become a growing concern for Washington and its regional allies.
Washington recently accused Beijing of orchestrating a “concerted” campaign of dangerous and provocative air force maneuvers against US military planes flying in international airspace in the region, warning that such moves could spark inadvertent conflict between the two powers.
Last month, Chinese fighter jets also buzzed a Canadian Aurora maritime patrol aircraft helping to enforce UN Security Council sanctions against North Korea in response to its nuclear weapons tests and ballistic missile launches.
Blair had called the latter actions by the Chinese air force — coming within 5m of the Canadian plane — “dangerous and reckless.”
Beijing hit back, accusing the Aurora plane of having “illegally intruded into the airspace” of Chiwei Islet (赤尾嶼), which lies in the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) — known as the Senkaku Islands in Japan, which administers the territory that is also claimed by Taiwan and China.
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
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