China decries ‘provocations’ after US destroyer sails through Taiwan Strait

USS Benfold makes its way through Beijing-claimed waters for the third time in a week. Tensions over Taiwan run high following reports that US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to visit the island next month

The Chinese military slammed Washington for its frequent “provocations” after an American guided-missile destroyer sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Tuesday.

The comments came after the USS Benfold made its way through waters claimed by mainland China for the third time in a week.

China’s Eastern Theatre Command, which is in charge of defence in the country’s eastern waters, including the Taiwan Strait, has criticised the US for provocations and destabilising the narrow waterway separating Taiwan and the Chinese mainland.

Tensions are high between the US and China after a report emerged that US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planned to visit the self-ruled island in August. If the trip comes to fruition, she would be the highest-ranking US official to visit the island since ties between Washington and Beijing normalised in 1979.

The American guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold is conducting what it calls “freedom of navigation operations” in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. Photo: US Navy
The American guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold is conducting what it calls “freedom of navigation operations” in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. Photo: US Navy
The Chinese military slammed Washington for its frequent “provocations” after an American guided-missile destroyer sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Tuesday.
The comments came after the USS Benfold made its way through waters claimed by mainland China for the third time in a week.
China’s Eastern Theatre Command, which is in charge of defence in the country’s eastern waters, including the Taiwan Strait, has criticised the US for provocations and destabilising the narrow waterway separating Taiwan and the Chinese mainland.
Beijing warns US will ‘bear all consequences’ if Pelosi visits Taiwan
19 Jul 2022

Tensions are high between the US and China after a report emerged that US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planned to visit the self-ruled island in August. If the trip comes to fruition, she would be the highest-ranking US official to visit the island since ties between Washington and Beijing normalised in 1979.
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“The ship transited through a corridor in the strait that is beyond the territorial sea of any coastal state,” the US Seventh Fleet said in a statement on Wednesday.

“The ship’s transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

The US Navy routinely travels to contentious sea territories to assert freedom of navigation as permitted by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), of which China is a signatory.

Beijing has said it has jurisdiction, sovereignty and sovereign rights – privileges of a coastal state to use a body of water – over the Taiwan Strait.

Taipei, however, said the strait was an international waterway and stood by the US freedom of navigation operations.

“The frequent provocations and showing off fully show that the US is the destroyer of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and the creator of security risks in the Taiwan Strait,” the Eastern Theatre Command said in a Wednesday statement after the Benfold’s trip.

“Troops of the theatre command are always on high alert and determined to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

Taiwan’s defence ministry said on Wednesday that the situation in the strait was “normal” as the Benfold sailed north.

On Saturday, the Benfold travelled near the disputed Spratly Islands, which China calls the Nansha Islands, in the South China Sea.

The destroyer also sailed near the contested Paracel Islands, called the Xisha Islands by China, on July 13 – a day after the sixth anniversary of an arbitration ruling that invalidated Beijing’s nine-dash-line claim over the South China Sea. Beijing has called that 2016 decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague “illegal and invalid”.

Taiwan has become a renewed flashpoint in US-China relations after reports of Pelosi’s potential trip and the US State Department approved an arms sale to the island worth an estimated US$108 million.

Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at Renmin University of China, said the mainland’s stern warning was not intended to stop Pelosi from visiting Taiwan because Beijing did not expect it would deter her.

“How China would retaliate, to what degree and when are determined by China’s strategic considerations,” he said. “So, it is very hard for us to say how the Chinese government will act in response.”

Those considerations would only be known to Beijing, he said, but he noted that China would not act in a way that is conducive to a large-scale military confrontation with the US unless it had no choice.

Beijing would only consider the use of force if Taipei declared independence from China or it deemed foreign forces to have seized control of Taiwan after assessing the cost and benefits of such an operation, he said.

Shi said Beijing still had considerable room to choose its level of response, and Pelosi’s potential visit was unlikely to push tensions towards a situation like the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis, when the PLA fired missiles into waters around the island after Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan’s president at the time, was allowed to visit the US.

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China decries ‘provocations’ after US destroyer sails through Taiwan Strait

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