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A guided missile destroyer of the US Navy. USA He sailed through the waters near the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea, challenging China’s claim on the area.
In a statement Wednesday, the US Navy said the USS Barry carried out the so-called “freedom of navigation operation” on Tuesday, a week after Beijing increased its claims in the area by designating an official administrative district for the islands. .
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The United States sought to assert “the rights, freedoms and legal uses of the sea recognized in international law,” the Navy said in a statement.
“Illegal and radical maritime claims in the South China Sea represent an unprecedented threat to the freedom of the seas, including the freedoms of navigation and overflight and the innocent right of way for all ships,” he said.
The move came amid rising tensions between the United States and China over the new coronavirus epidemic, in which Washington accused Beijing of concealing and minimizing the initial outbreak after the virus emerged late last year in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
The US State Department had previously said that China was taking advantage of the region’s focus on the coronavirus pandemic to “force its neighbors.”
On Wednesday, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, also accused China of wanting to lose in the November presidential elections.
Chinese ‘illegal’ claim
China claims the entire South China Sea, which is said to harbor valuable oil and gas deposits, triggering a long-standing dispute over maritime territory with countries across Southeast Asia.
Vietnam and Taiwan also claim the Paracels, while the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei claim other parts of the sea.
It was recently reported that a Malaysian oil exploration ship was involved in a confrontation with a Chinese research vessel.
In a statement on the website of the People’s Liberation Army, the Chinese military said it had mobilized maritime and air assets to track and warn the US ship to move away from “Chinese territorial waters.”
The EPL accused the United States of “provocative acts” that “seriously violated international law and China’s sovereign and security interests.”
The US action was “also inconsistent with the current joint efforts of the international community to fight COVID-19,” he said.
Last week, China attempted to further advance its territorial claims when it announced that the Paracel and the nearby Spratly Islands, Macclesfield Bank and its surrounding waters would be administered under two new districts of the city of Sansha, which China created on nearby Woody Island. in 2012.
It also announced official Chinese names for 80 islands and other geographic features in the South China Sea, including reefs, seamounts, sandbars and ridges, 55 of which are submerged in water.
It also established a “mental health center” at Mischief Reef, which has been declared by the international court in The Hague as within the Philippine Exclusive Economic Zone.
China bets on the sea in its controversial nine-line line demarcation; a 2,000 kilometer (1,242 mile) U-shaped dashed line that first appeared on maps of revolutionary China in the 1940s.
But the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague 2016 China’s claims rejected as illegal to almost the entire sea, through which approximately $ 3 trillion of trade passes each year.
SOURCE:
Al Jazeera and news agencies
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