China can’t stop US naval operations, Pacific Fleet commander says

Speaking at the Cooperative Strategy Forum held at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, Swift said China’s military buildup in the disputed Spratly Islands has not stopped the U.S. Pacific Fleet from carrying on operations, Stars and Stripes reported Monday.

The U.S. Pacific Command had hoped to carry out another “freedom of navigation” exercise in the region as early as December as part of the Navy’s plan to regularly exercise its rights under global law, officials have said.

The filling station will be located on Woody Island in the Paracels, a group of islands controlled by China but claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan.

The comments follow audio released by the BBC late yesterday after a reporting assignment in the Spratly archipelago.

“The Chinese people can not understand why the Australian military would get involved, and to be honest, they have less patience to prevent a flare up”, the newspaper said.

The admiral’s speech, delivered to a regional security forum, was his second concerning the South China Sea since October, and was tougher in tone than his previous warnings about the situation.

But experts said it sent a clear message that Australia would not yield space to China’s growing ambition to unilaterally control the strategically important waters.

“China has not violated the core interests of those countries, they come to the South China Sea to “play cards”, for other strategic goals, and they’re not really there to oppose China”.

He reported that the Chinese embassy warned of “problems” if the flight was attempted before they took off from the Philippines in a Cessna 206 with two pilots, an engineers and cameraman.

Yesterday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry voiced a more muted concern over the flight.

“I don’t feel it’s necessary to commit the MSDF to performing a kind of operation that it has never performed before”, said Graham.

The article comes after an RAAF P-3 Orion aircraft was detected patrolling the area by the BBC, who picked up an Australian official telling the Chinese navy via radio communications that the plane was ‘exercising worldwide freedom of navigation rights’.

In a challenge to China’s island building program, Manila has asked the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague to affirm its right to areas within 200 nautical miles of its coastline, under the terms of a United Nations convention.

Responsibility for these heightened tensions rests squarely with the United States which has intervened in the long-running territorial disputes in the South China Sea as a means of driving a wedge between China and its neighbours. What would also help, he said, is if Japan is “more vocal about that than it has in the past”.

The most significant aspect of the BBC’s reportage was the inadvertent interception of a radio message from an Australian military aircraft near Mischief Reef.