The prospect of escalation in the stand-off between Beijing and Washington over the South China Sea was increased after Beijing said it was prepared to fight for its sovereign territorial rights in the region.
The US navy sent a guided-missile destroyer on patrol within a 12-nautical-mile exclusion area around an artificial island in Spratly Islands on Tuesday.
In response, China sent a guided-missile destroyer, the Lanzhou, and the naval patrol ship Taizhou to the area, and the vessels shadowed and gave warnings to the USS Lassen, the defence ministry said.
On the diplomatic front, late on Tuesday the Chinese vice foreign minister Zhang Yesui summoned US ambassador to China Max Baucus to protest over the issue.
In an editorial, the official state news agency Xinhua said in a commentary that the move would “strain the China-US relations and damage mutual trust”.
“Decision-makers in Washington need to be reminded that China has little room for compromise when it comes to matters regarding its sovereignty, and it will take whatever means at whatever cost to safeguard its sovereign interests,” the commentary said.
While the rhetoric is indeed fiery, Beijing’s response to date has been fairly measured and there are no signs yet of the dispute escalating into skirmishes. Washington has expressed its irritation with China’s growing regional ambitions on many occasions in recent months, and it says it will make “freedom-of-navigation” patrols more frequent.
China has built a series of artificial islands in the Spratly archipelago to underline its territorial claims to most of the South China Sea, a key trade route through which more than $5 trillion (€4.5 trillion) worth of world trade passes every year, including a large part of the world’s oil shipments.
Its ambitions in the maritime area have led to tensions with its neighbours, many of whom have rival claims to sections of the maritime region, including Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan.
The decision comes weeks after China's president Xi Jinping made an official state visit to Washington, and he and US president Barack Obama discussed rising tensions in the South China Sea, a key impediment to better relations between Beijing and Washington.
Tuesday’s patrol was a test of Chinese resolve behind its 12-nautical-mile territorial limits around the islands, which have military-length runways.
China’s sovereignty claims in the region are based on the “nine-dashed line” or the “U-shaped line” outlined by the government to include contested areas such as the Spratlys, the Paracel Islands and other areas including the Macclesfield Bank, the Scarborough Shoal and the Pratas Islands.
The claim is hotly disputed by the Philippines and Vietnam, and has been criticised by the US and Japan.
While the claim has no formal basis, the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said: “China was the first country to discover and name these island groups. The history of continuous use and exercise of authority spans over 2,000 years.”
The official People's Liberation Army Daily ran an editorial on its front page saying the US was a destabilising force that had caused chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a commentary carried in the newspaper, senior colonel Yang Yujun, accused the US of "muscle flexing" and said the move provoked China's national security and severely jeopardised regional peace and stability.
“The US intends to militarise the South China Sea by coercing countries in the region to be involved in military conflicts,” he said.
