US, China confirm need for naval dialogue over S. China Sea

The Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Vietnam also claim part of the waters, which are a vital worldwide trade route.

China suffered a setback on Thursday in its broad territorial claims in the South China Sea when an arbitration court in The Hague said it had jurisdiction to hear a few territorial claims the Philippines filed against China.

Chen said religious sites in the South China Sea signify Chinese people’s efforts to develop the area.

A US official said Harris, who has been highly critical of China’s island building in the Spratlys, would visit Beijing next week and Swift later in the year. McCain said Washington should continue to support partner countries and allies such as the Philippines in the face of China’s assertiveness, including through routine freedom-of-navigation patrols like the one that angered Beijing this week.

Without issuing a formal statement, a senior Blue House official, asked to comment by reporters said, “South Korea has been strongly calling for restraint of any action that affects peace and stability in the region”, adding that disputes should be resolved according to worldwide norms.

“We would urge the United States side not to continue down the wrong path”, Yang Yujun, the defence ministry spokesman, said.

The Tribunal also held that “China’s decision not to participate in these proceedings does not deprive the Tribunal of jurisdiction and that the Philippines’ decision to commence arbitration unilaterally was not an abuse of the Convention’s dispute settlement procedures”. “They are operations in worldwide waters and they are not meant to be nor should they be perceived to be by anybody as provocative”, he said.

EEZ can only be imposed based on boundaries of inhabitable land, and this has prompted all the countries making claims on the region to station personnel, and in a few cases build military bases out of the water, to bolster their claim.

“The result of this arbitration will not impact China’s sovereignty, rights or jurisdiction over the South China Sea under historical facts and worldwide law”, Liu said.

US Pacific Command (PACOM) commander Admiral Harry Harris testified last month, ‘If you look at all of these facilities – and you could imagine a network of missiles sites, runways for their fifth-generation fighters and surveillance sites and all that – it creates a mechanism in which China would have de facto control over the South China Sea in any scenario short of war’. The United States refuses to recognise the man-made islets as deserving of sovereign territory status.

As early as mid-May, the Pentagon started considering sending military aircraft and ships into the Spratly island chain in order to challenge China’s claims to sovereignty and its island construction program. Notably, the Court has rejected an argument in China’s position paper that the “2002 China-ASEAN Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea constitutes an agreement to resolve disputes relating to the South China Sea exclusively through negotiation”.

An expert has found Chinese religious sites on islands in the South China Sea, which are being presented as further evidence of China’s sovereignty over the area.

“Today’s ruling is an important step forward in upholding worldwide law against China’s attempts to assert vast and, in my view, questionable claims in the South China Sea”, he said.

Chinese Admiral Wu Shengli and U.S. chief of naval operations Admiral John Richardson will hold an hour-long video conference on Thursday, concerning the recent tension between the United States and China, after a USA warship patrolled 12-nautical miles around an artificial Chinese island in the South China sea (Spratly archipelago) on Tuesday morning.