China has fired two medium-range “ship killer” projectiles into the South China Sea as a warning after the U.S. disrupted Beijing’s military drills with a U-2 spy plane.
According to SCMP, a source close to the China military has claimed it serves as a warning shot to the U.S. One of the missiles, a DF-26B, was launched from the northwestern province of Qinghai.
The other, a DF-21D, was launched from Zhejiang province in the east.
They were both fired into the area southeast of Hainan province and the Paracel islands, according to the source. It’s unknown if the U.S. had carriers in the region at the time that China fired its warning missiles. However, the last military exercise was in early July.
The source told SCMP: “This is China’s response to the potential risks brought by the increasingly frequent incoming US warplanes and military vessels in the South China Sea.” The source added, “China doesn’t want the neighboring countries to misunderstand Beijing’s goals.”
Song Zhongping, a Hong Kong-based military commentator, added: “The US continues to test China’s bottom line in Taiwan and South China Sea issues, and this pushed China to showcase its military strength to let Washington know that even US aircraft carriers cannot flex their full muscle near China’s coast.”
The Dailymail reported that a statement was issued late Tuesday by the Ministry of National Defense which said the action had “seriously interfered in normal exercise activities’ and ‘severely incurred the risk of misjudgment and even of bringing about an unintended air-sea incident.”
‘This was a naked act of provocation,’” the ministry said, quoting spokesperson Wu Qian. China has lodged a stern protest and demanded the U.S. cease such actions, Wu said.
This comes a day after China said a U.S. U-2 spy plane entered a no-fly zone without permission during a Chinese live-fire naval drill, the report adds. This also comes after the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) posted a video on social media showing Hong Kong air defense drills as Anewspost reported.
A military analyst told Hong Kong’s leading dissident newspaper, Apple Daily, that the bizarre 48-second video the PLA posted was meant as a warning to the United States against interfering with China’s oppression of Hong Kong. Now, there has been a second warning a firing of live missiles.
The PLA has been increasing the number of military drills across East Asia as relations with the U.S continue to deteriorate. This comes after two American aircraft carriers held an unusual exercise in the South China Sea in July, as well as a mysterious visit to Taiwan by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
Upon Azar’s visit to Taiwan, Chinese state media angrily threatened to retaliate by holding live-fire missile drills near Taiwan and Guam, where the U.S. has a major airbase in the region. The editorial that made this threat was re-posted on the PLA’s English-language news website, which is another sign that China is directing its rhetoric directly at Americans and wants the U.S. to see its warnings.
China claims that Taiwan is its territory and threatens to use military force to bring under its control the island that is a self-governing democracy and close U.S. ally, CBS reported.
A top Republican lawmaker Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) who sits on the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation recently predicted that an armed war with China was imminent.
“I would predict there will be a clash within the next three to six months,” Yoho told the Washington Examiner.
The Florida Republican predicted that armed conflict will be triggered by a Chinese naval attack against the U.S. Pacific Fleet, which often commands a strong presence in the South China Sea, as Anewspost reported.
Knowing China, I think what they would do is ram one of our ships and say it was a mistake, Yoho told the Examiner.
To sink a carrier would be a huge mistake, to attack any of our ships would be a huge mistake, but I think they’re willing to risk that to test the waters, he explained. “And unfortunately, people will die. It would just be a mistake if they did that, for them.
Last year, Senior Chinese military official Dai Xu (戴旭), threatened U.S. Navy vessels in the South China Sea, recommending that China should attack the ships. This was after the U.S. sent a Navy destroyer the USS McCampbell into the contested Chinese waters, near the disputed islands in the South China Sea during ongoing trade talks in what China called a “provocation,” Reuters reported.
Xu recommended aggressive action against the U.S. if it “breaks into Chinese waters again” stating the following: “If the U.S. warships break into Chinese waters again, I suggest that two warships should be sent: one to stop it, and another one to ram it… In our territorial waters, we won’t allow US warships to create a disturbance,” Taiwan News reported.
Last year, China’s President Xi Jinping ordered the Chinese armed forces People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to enhance their combat readiness to safeguard national sovereignty, security, and development interests after the U.S. had issued a travel warning to China stating Americans were at risk to arbitrary and indefinite detention.
The world is facing a period of major changes never seen in a century, and China is still in an important period of strategic opportunity for development, Xi said, to the Central Military Commission (CMC) warning that various risks and challenges were on the rise. The entire armed forces should have a correct understanding of China’s security and development trends, enhance their awareness of danger, crisis and war, and make solid efforts on combat preparations in order to accomplish the tasks assigned by the Party and the people,” Xi added according to a press release.
Relations with China have begun to deteriorate in recent years. Those ties have rapidly diminished due to President Donald Trump’s trade war with Beijing as well as the recent pandemic which the sitting President has blamed on China. If that’s not enough, FBI Director Christopher Wray revealed earlier this year that China has stepped up its espionage efforts against the U.S., forcing the FBI to open a new China-related counterintelligence investigation every 10 hours.
The FBI has also previously discussed several suspicious encounters where Chinese nationals were trying to smuggle viruses out of the U.S, Yahoo News reported.
According to one document, an unknown Chinese man was caught transporting biological vials of MERS and SARS labeled “antibodies” after being stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at Detroit Metro airport.
This doesn’t include the case in January, where the head of Harvard University’s chemistry department, Charles Lieber, was federally charged with failing to disclose funding from the Chinese government, after he hid his involvement in China’s “Thousand Talents Program,” along with Chinese nationals.
The FBI’s report also specifically uses the words, “biosecurity risk” when describing China, which is typically used to refer to the intentional misuse of pathogens, such as for bioterrorism and biosafety, which covers accidental release according to the World Health Organization.
Several national security experts have said China is waging a “cold war” against the U.S.; however, Yoho thinks a pending attack is coming and it will be anything but “cold.”
Beijing’s state media has previously warned any attempt to prevent China from accessing its interests in the region of the South China Sea could risk sparking a “large-scale war.”
The trumpets of war seem to be sounding with the two countries getting closer and closer to conflict. Right now no one has been injured or killed, but the moment that happens, full-scale war could break-out overnight. And that’s not fear-mongering, it’s reporting truthfully on the current geopolitical situation between the U.S. and China, a slippery slope that just seems to be getting slipperier by the day.
Source: Anewspost.com
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