China has dispatched its most modern patrol ship to the South China Seas, state media said yesterday, after an incident with a US naval vessel and a fresh claim by the Philippines to disputed territory.
The Beijing News newspaper said the vessel would conduct patrols of what it called China’s “exclusive maritime zone” in the disputed waters surrounding the Paracel and Spratly Islands.
It said the converted naval rescue ship would aid Chinese fishing boats and transport vessels.
The Fishery Administration Ship No 311 left Hainan on Saturday and was scheduled to reach the Paracel islands yesterday, Beijing News said.
The paper said that the largest and fastest ship in China’s fishery administration fleet had been dispatched to patrol the zone.
In an earlier report, the Global Times newspaper said the No. 311 — a converted naval vessel weighing 4,450 tonnes with a top speed of 37kph — left the port of Guangzhou on Tuesday.
It quoted Fishery Administration Director Wu Zhuang (吳壯) as saying the ship was part of a planned expansion of patrols over the next five years in the South China Sea.
Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on Wednesday signed into law a bill defining the country’s territorial boundaries and laying claim to areas including the Spratlys and the nearby Scarborough Shoal, or Huangyan islands.
Beijing has called the law “illegal and invalid” and claimed “indisputable sovereignty” over the two island groups.
The Spratly and Paracel island chains have been flashpoints for years.
The Spratlys are claimed in full or part by China and Vietnam as well as the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan, and the Paracels are claimed by China, which now occupies them, as well as by Vietnam and Taiwan.
Tensions in the area rose further when the US sent destroyers to international waters off southern China to protect a naval surveillance patrol that was involved in a stand off with Chinese vessels.
China says the US patrol vessels were within its 200km “economic exclusive zone,” but the US has insisted they were in international waters.
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