A Canadian general criticized the Chinese air force over an incident off the coast of the Asian nation that apparently saw a fighter jet cut off a patrol plane and drop flares in its path.
The episode on Monday was reported by Global News, which had journalists on the Canadian surveillance aircraft. Chinese fighters also flew within 5m of the plane, it added.
“They became very aggressive and to a degree we would deem it unsafe and unprofessional,” Canadian Major-General Iain Huddleston told the Canadian news outlet.
Canada did not want to have “anything untoward happen that would result in loss of life,” he said.
Beijing filed a diplomatic complaint with Ottawa over the incident in the South China Sea, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Mao Ning (毛寧) told a regular press briefing in Beijing yesterday, adding that in recent years Canadian planes have conducted reconnaissance “against China.”
“Canadian airships have made trouble at the doorstep of China,” she said. “Canada should respect facts and stop spreading false information.”
The Chinese Ministry of National Defense did not immediately respond to a faxed request for comment.
The incident highlights China’s frustration over Western military flights near its shores, though they are carried out in international airspace. In May, the Pentagon said a Chinese fighter jet that swerved in front of a US reconnaissance aircraft over the South China Sea behaved in an “unnecessarily aggressive maneuver.”
Last year, Chinese fighters reportedly buzzed Canadian planes in the region and released small pieces of aluminum in front of Australian aircraft.
Canada said the 13-member crew of the plane involved in the incident on Monday was part of a UN mission aimed at enforcing sanctions against North Korea to encourage the nation to end its nuclear weapons program.
The missions, which include Japan, France and the US, are aimed at spotting “evasion activities, in particular ship-to-ship transfers of fuel and other commodities,” Ottawa said.
In related news, Chinese and Japanese coast guard ships faced off in waters around disputed islands in the East China Sea, both countries said yesterday.
China said it drove away several Japanese vessels that “illegally” entered territorial waters on Monday around the islands, which it calls Diaoyutais (釣魚台), and it urged Japan to stop all “illegal activities” in the area.
Japan controls the islands and calls them the Senkaku.
Japan’s coast guard said in a press release it ordered two Chinese coast guard vessels to leave the waters around the islands and maneuvered its ships to prevent them from approaching Japanese fishing boats.
The uninhabited area has long been a sticking point in ties between the two countries.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country