Kerry urges ‘peaceful resolution’ to South China Sea dispute

Harris said it was “preposterous” that China would try to “wedge itself” between South Korea and the US for a missile defense system created to defend Americans and Koreans on the Korean Peninsula.

His Chinese counterpart added that he didn’t want to see any more US military over flights or patrols.

Last week, the administration said that China appeared to have deployed surface-to-air missiles on another artificial island in the disputed sea.

“China is clearly militarising the South China Sea”, Harris told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“We are very concerned that these actions are increasing tensions in the region and are counterproductive”, the USA ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Nina Hachigian, told reporters on Wednesday.

The photographs come only a week after United States (US) officials said China had deployed surface to air missiles in the Paracel islands further north, and with tensions mounting in the strategically vital region.

“We do not accept the DPRK’s nuclear missile programme and we do not recognise the DPRK as a nuclear weapons state”, Wang said.

China’s president Xi Jinping said past year that his country “does intend to pursue militarisation” of the disputed Spratly island chain.

The presence of high-powered radar would be the latest twist to the drama developing in the South China Sea, a 1.3 square mile stretch of water and island chains that is being contested by Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

“It’s important to notice that in recent decades some countries have illegally occupied China’s reefs and atolls and have engaged in large-scale military constructions not only of radars, but also of missiles and all kinds of cannons and artilleries”, Wang said.

He said militarization was not the responsibility of one party alone.

They would be highly vulnerable in conflict but would give China “a significant intelligence advantage – and make it much harder for the U.S. and other regional navies and air forces to move through the South China Sea undetected”, he added. “The situation in the South China Sea is overall stable”. “You’d have to believe in a flat earth to believe otherwise”. It was not the first time China sent jets there but the move raised new questions about its intentions.

CSIS wrote that the sum total of the construction suggests “a long-term anti-access strategy by China – one that would see it establish effective control over the sea and airspace throughout the South China Sea”, according to The Wall Street Journal. The top diplomats of the US and China meet February 23, in Washington at a fraught time in relations between the two world powers. “This shouldn’t seem provocative”.

The Chinese foreign minister asked the media on Tuesday not to forget the strategic bombers the USA has flown in the past, but also expressed a shared desire to resolve disputes through peaceful dialogue. Wang said a resolution could be passed in the “near future”. A leading USA military officer told Congress that China was seeking to control East Asia.

China on Tuesday reaffirmed its right to self-defense and refuted US accusation as “hyping with ulterior motives” after a USA think tank report said China might be installing radar on islands of the South China Sea.