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WASHINGTON: A guided missile destroyer of the US Navy. USA It sailed through the waters near the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea, challenging China’s claim to the area, the Navy said Wednesday (April 29).
The USS Barry carried out the so-called “freedom of navigation operation” on Tuesday, a week after Beijing increased its claims to the region by designating an official administrative district for the islands.
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 in December and January in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
The United States rejects China’s territorial claim to much of the South China Sea, including the Paracels, also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan.
The region is believed to have valuable oil and gas deposits.
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 islands of Spratly, Macclesfield Bank and its surrounding waters would be administered under two new districts of the city of Sansha, which China created in 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.
