Tensions rise in South China Sea after Beijing missile deployment
Updated : 14:51
Tensions rose in the South China Sea on Wednesday after satellite images surfaced which appeared to show that the People’s Republic of China had deployed two batteries of surface-to-air missiles and a radar system to the disputed Woody island, or Yongxing in Chinese.
It also raised the risk of a militarisation of the region.
Woody island was the largest in the Paracels archipelago.
Although it lay within China’s 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone, as defined under the United Nations’s Convention on the Law of the Sea, it was the subject of a territorial dispute between China, Taiwan and Vietnam.
The commander of the US Pacific Fleet confirmed the deployment to Reuters and said that such a move would be “a militarisation of the South China Sea in ways" that China's president Xi Jinping had promised not to undertake, the BBC said.
During a visit to the US in September, Jinping made a public pledge not to militarise the islands it was building in the Spratlys archipelago further south.
Some observers believed the deployment of the so-called SAM missiles to Woody island was only a matter of time given the recent construction of hardened shelters for use by military aircraft.
Japan's chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, voiced his country’s “serious concerns” about China’s unilateral move to modify the ‘status quo’ in the region.
“We cannot accept this fact,” Suga added.
Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi defended "the limited and necessary self-defence facilities" on islands inhabited by Chinese personnel as "consistent with the right for self-preservation and self-protection.... under the international law", the BBC reported.
Beijing’s move followed a two-day meeting between South East Asian regional leaders in California where the territorial disputes in that part of the Pacific had been discussed.
US president Obama reportedly said the need to halt “further [land] reclamation, new construction and militarization of disputed areas" had been discussed.