The 46th fleet of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy sets sail from a military port in Zhanjiang, south China’s Guangdong Province, Feb. 21, 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Xinhua News Agency | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images<\/p>\n
China said Wednesday it warned and “drove away” a U.S. destroyer that had sailed near the coast of the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea \u2014 one of the most valuable shipping lanes globally.<\/p>\n
The destroyer, USS Higgins, “illegally entered China’s territorial waters off Huangyan Island without the approval of the Chinese government,” the country’s defense ministry<\/a> said, according to a CNBC translation of the statement in Mandarin.<\/p>\n Huangyan Island is the name China uses to refer to the shoal, which has been the subject of a maritime dispute between China and the Philippines.<\/p>\n China accused the U.S. military of “seriously” infringing its sovereignty, adding that America’s actions “severely undermine peace and stability in the South China Sea, and violate international law and basic norms governing international relations.”<\/p>\n The USS Higgins is a destroyer with the U.S. Seventh Fleet, based in Yokosuka, Japan<\/a>, which did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.<\/p>\n The incident comes at a time when Washington and Beijing are locked in a trade spat that has seen the two issue incendiary statements, with China in March warning that it was prepared for “a trade war or any other type of war,”<\/a> with the U.S., before tensions subsided.<\/p>\n On Tuesday, a Chinese warship<\/a> had crashed into\u00a0one of its own coast guard vessels<\/a>\u00a0as it chased a patrol boat belonging to\u00a0the Philippines<\/a>.<\/p>\n China claims almost all of the South China Sea as its own under its “nine-dash-line<\/a>,” which rejects a\u00a02016 ruling<\/a>\u00a0by an international arbitration court in the Netherlands, that found no legal or historical basis for Beijing’s claims.\u00a0<\/p>\n There have been several clashes between Chinese and Filipino ships<\/a> in the South China Sea, with the Philippines accusing Beijing’s forces last year of pursuing Philippine vessels and directing lasers at patrolling aircrafts near another contested reef.<\/p>\n Clashes have involved boat collisions, water cannons and injuries to Filipino sailors, according to Filipino officials.<\/p>\n In May 2024, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said that should a Filipino citizen be killed in the South China Sea<\/a> via an incident with the Chinese Coast Guard, it would almost certainly be a “red line” and come “very, very close to what we define as an act of war.”<\/p>\n