By Tony Seed

A statement on the incident from US Indo-Pacific Command says the Chinese ship “executed maneuvers in an unsafe manner” in the presence of US and Canadian warships during a “routine south to north Taiwan Strait transit” by the naval forces of those nations, coming as close as 150 yards from the American vessel.

The reader may well ask: what is a Chinese navy vessel doing in the Taiwan Strait, right where US and Canadian warships are peacefully conducting routine navigation exercises? Exercises they cannot conduct off the coast of British Columbia or the state of Washington?

It seems that China has somehow brilliantly managed to place its country immediately adjacent to the Taiwan Strait, and is now only 100 miles from Taiwan itself. This narrow channel of water was the only space the US and Canadian navies were given practice and to travel through, placing them dangerously close to Chinese warships, and to the country of China.

China has yet to issue a formal apology for menacing the US navy with the unsafe maneuverings of both its battleship and its geographical location.

The Canadian warship accompanying USS Chung-Hoon was HMCS Montréal, normally based in Halifax on the Atlantic Ocean. It is joined on Operation Projection by the Naval Replenishment Unit Asterix. The sphere of operations of Projection includes the Middle East and West Africa, according to DND. On May 4, the warships were in the Red Sea.

Montreal conveniently carried a Global news reporter embedded on board since May 25, one Mackenzie Gray, apparently to provide a neutral third party witness to US “innocent passage” and Chinese aggression. “Global News has seen Chinese warships shadowing the Canadian vessel on multiple occasions during its transit,” he reported excitedly. In a military operation, Mr Gray was flown all the way from Canada to capture these moments for the TV viewers in Canada.

Amidst its understandable hysteria, Global let it slip that “The Chinese told both the Canadian and American ships over radio systems that they are entering Chinese territory, despite the joint mission taking place in internationally recognized waters, according to Mountford,” commander of Montreal.

Noting in its statement that it was acting “in accordance with international law” at the time of the incident, US Indo-Pacific Command says that its transit “demonstrates the combined U.S.-Canadian commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” adding that the US military “flies, sails, and operates safely and responsibly anywhere international law allows.”

Canada’s defence minister Anita Anand, from a security summit in Singapore with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, echoed the American commander. She bravely declared neither Canada nor its allies would be deterred from sailing in international waters. “Canada will continue to sail where international law allows, including the Strait, the South China Sea. And really, our overall goal is to increase the peace and stability of this region. And that’s why we are going to continue to see more of Canada in this region as set out in our Indo-Pacific strategy. We’ve already seen unsafe intercepts and we have addressed those appropriately with China in terms of our RCAF pilots. Actors in this region must engage responsibly, and that’s the bottom line.” Free and open, safe and responsible, according to the American vocabulary, is evidently only when the territory is under NATO control.

Which is of course true. These are international waters after all, and the Chinese navy should therefore stay out of the way of US military and NATO vessels traveling through them, just as the US navy would stay out of the way of Chinese military forces traveling a few miles off the coast of California or transiting between the islands of Hawaii. The US is only asking for the same freedom of navigation it would afford anyone else. Why the US also officially states that the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Northwest Passage are also international waters and not part of the sovereign seas of Canada!

We saw another incident of China’s aggressive and dangerous terrestrial placement on the 26th of May, when a US spy plane was buzzed by a Chinese fighter jet during peaceful surveillance operations over the South China Sea. A statement by US Indo-Pacific Command called the incident “an unnecessarily aggressive maneuver” which interrupted the “safe and routine operations” of the spy plane.

What the hell is going on here? What is a Chinese fighter jet doing all the way over in the South China Sea?

Independent blogger Caitlin Johnstone, who first raised these questions, writes:

Obviously Chinese fighter jets have no business operating in that region, especially when their movements endanger the US spy planes who are flying their peaceful missions there. But as with the Taiwan Strait, the imperialist aggressions of the Chinese Communist Party have been so expansionist in nature that the South China Sea now sits immediately adjacent to mainland China.

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Via https://tonyseed.wordpress.com/2023/06/11/yet-another-case-of-china-placing-country-dangerously-close-to-us-and-canadian-warships/