The 46th fleet of the Chinese Navy of the Liberation Army sets on February 21, 2024 by a military port in Zhanjiang, the province of Guangdong in southern China.
Xinhua news agency | Xinhua news agency | Getty pictures
China said on Wednesday that it warned of a US destroyer and “drove away” near the coast of the controversial Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea – one of the most valuable shipping routes worldwide.
The destroyer, USS Higgins, “has illegally occurred in China's territorial waters ahead of Huangyan Island without agreeing to the Chinese government,” said the country's Ministry of Defense, according to a CNBC translation of the declaration in Mandarin.
Huangyan Island is the name used to refer to the swing, the subject of a maritime dispute between China and the Philippines.
China accused the US military to have “seriously” violated its sovereignty, and added that America's actions “undermine peace and stability in the South China Sea and violate international law and fundamental norms for international relations”.
The USS Higgins is a warship with the seventh US fleet based in Yokosuka, Japan. Sarah Merrill, a spokesman for the fleet, told CNBC that the USS Higgins carried out a “freedom of freedom of navigation” in accordance with international law.
“China's statement about this mission is wrong … The United States defend their right to fly, sail and operate, wherever international law allows, as the USS Higgins did here. Nothing China says, otherwise it will put it off,” added Merrill.
The incident is carried out at a time when Washington and Beijing are locked up in a trade spitting in which the two statements of fire statements were warned in March that it was prepared with the USA for “a trade war or another kind of war” before the tensions declined.
On Tuesday, a Chinese warship came into one of his own coast guard ships when a patrol boat of the Philippines followed.
China claims that almost the entire South China Sea under its “nine-dash line”, which rejects a judgment of an international arbitration court in the Netherlands in the Netherlands in 2016, which has not rejected no legal or historical basis for Beijing's claims.
There were several clashes between Chinese and Filipino ships in the southern Chinese Sea, with the Philippines accused of Beijing's armed forces last year, persecuted Filipino ships and laser on patrolling aircraft near another contested riff.
According to the Filipino officials, these were collisions with boat collisions, water cannons and injuries to the Filipino seafarers.
In May 2024, Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said that a Filipino citizen in the South China Sea would with quite a certain certainty with the Chinese coast guard and “very, very, very close to what we define as an act of war”.
He added that “our contractual partners, which I believe, also have the same standard and refer to us to US armed forces. Washington has had a mutual defense agreement with Manila since 1951, who says that an attack on the Philippines or the USA is seen as an attack on others in the Pacific.
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