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The USS Benfold in the port of Quingdao in 2016
Photo: Borg Wong / AP
The Paracel Islands are just a few narrow coral atolls and sandbars, surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of water in every compass direction - actually.
But the sparsely populated islands in the South China Sea have been causing tension in the region for years because Taiwan and Vietnam are making territorial claims on the islands occupied by China.
Valuable raw materials lie under water.
Now there has been another incident off the islands.
As the Chinese military announced, a US warship was "expelled" from the waters near the Paracel Islands on Monday.
The destroyer USS Benfold had entered the area without China's permission, it said.
The US would have violated China's sovereignty and endangered stability in the South China Sea.
"We call on the United States to stop such provocative actions immediately," said a command of the Chinese armed forces according to the Reuters news agency in a statement.
The timing of the incident is arguably no coincidence - July 12th marks the fifth anniversary of a judgment on China's territorial claims in the region. In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that the People's Republic had no sovereignty in the region. At that time it was primarily about the Scarborough Reef off the Philippine coast, but the court of arbitration had also flatly rejected further territorial claims by China.
China claims more than 80 percent of the three million square kilometers area for itself - although the islands and reefs are sometimes much closer to the coasts of other countries. The People's Republic justifies this with the so-called "nine-dash line", a mark on a map from the 1940s that extends far to the south. Beijing had already not accepted the arbitration award at that time and called the judgment "null and void".
In line with the verdict, the US rejected China's allegations of illegally entering foreign territory.
The "Benfold" had exercised their navigational rights and freedoms in the area under international law, according to a statement by the US Navy.
"By conducting this operation, the United States has demonstrated that these waters lie outside of what China can lawfully claim for itself," said the US armed forces.
The Paracel Islands are only a fraction of the areas over which there is a dispute in the resource-rich South China Sea.
In addition to Taiwan and Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines also lay claim to a number of small islands and the surrounding sea areas in which China has already deployed military or mines raw materials.
Blinken warns China of attack on the Philippines
"Nowhere in the world is the rules-based maritime order as in danger as in the South China Sea," said US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
At the same time, he warned China against military intervention against the Philippine military or civilian ships and aircraft in the country.
In such a case, the United States would have to assist the Philippines under a defense pact from 1951.
Blinken also appealed to China to stop the "provocative behavior".
The US had already increased its presence in the region last year and carried out exercises with several thousand soldiers.
fek / Reuters
