…and once again the U.S. ship is a submarine hunter. As I have said in the past these incidents not only signal an increasingly assertive Chinese stance, they also make me wonder about how much the People’s Liberation Army Navy is pushing things, given the much more aggressive comments made by senior naval officers about these clashes compared to civilians. anyway, here’s the whole piece, which was behind a paywall at the South China Morning Post:
Another naval confrontation between a US surveillance ship and Chinese vessels took place in the Yellow Sea on Friday, the Pentagon said last night. A spokesman called the PLA ships’ actions “unsafe and dangerous”.
Two unnamed US defence officials said two Chinese vessels “came dangerously close” to the sub-hunting USNS Victorious.
A vessel from the Bureau of Fisheries Patrol used a high-intensity spotlight on Victorious several times, they said. The Chinese vessels came to within 27 metres of the US ship and the American crew sprayed water from their fire hoses to warn them off during the hour-long incident.
They said the Victorious was “operating in international waters”, roughly 193km off the mainland coast. The area is within China’s exclusive economic zone under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the US has yet to ratify.
Under the convention, prior consent is needed for any scientific activity within the EEZ.
In a statement, the Pentagon said: “USNS Victorious was conducting routine operations … in international waters in the Yellow Sea, in accordance with customary international law, when two Chinese fishing vessels closed in on and manoeuvred in close proximity to the Victorious. The intentions of the Chinese fishing vessels were not known.”
Spokesman Bryan Whitman said the vessels did not leave the vicinity of the Victorious until it radioed a nearby PLA vessel for help. Asked why the tone of the Pentagon’s statement was muted, he said: “We will be developing a way forward to deal with this diplomatically.”
It is the second such naval standoff between the two sides within two months and took place as a top aide of US President Barack Obama called for more military exchanges with China to prevent such confrontations happening.
In March, five Chinese ships had a confrontation with another US Navy surveillance ship, the USNS Impeccable, 120km south of Hainan Island . The incident triggered a diplomatic storm.
A mainland military expert said the latest confrontation had been triggered by the US. He accused the Pentagon officials of deliberately releasing the information to the press to create tension.
“Maybe some people at the Pentagon are angry over the military budget cut by President Obama,” the expert, Ni Lexiong, said. “It wants to play up the China threat theory and help them save their budget.”