China navy officers harangue U.S. over ocean spat
(For full coverage of the naval row, click [nSP481672])
By Chris Buckley
BEIJING, March 11 (Reuters) - Senior Chinese navy officers poured scorn on the United States in the wake of a weekend naval confrontation, with one saying the "Americans are villains", as fallout over the incident between the two giants simmered.
In comments carried by the official China News Service, Chinese officers repeated their government's view that a U.S. naval ship had violated the country's sovereignty during an encounter with Chinese ships in the South China Sea on Sunday.
Five Chinese ships jostled with the U.S. Navy survey vessel in waters off China's southern Hainan island, a major base for Beijing's expanding navy. A senior U.S. intelligence official said on Tuesday the confrontation showed China's increasingly aggressive military stance in the South China Sea.
But Beijing pressed its claim that the U.S. ship, not its vessels, was in the wrong.
"The Americans are villains crying foul first," said Zhang Deshun, a Chinese navy deputy chief of staff, the China News Service reported late on Tuesday.
"The U.S. side has twisted the facts. The U.S. survey ship was operating in China's exclusive economic zone on its continental shelf. Our vessels were just going about normal business ... This was itself harming China's sovereignty."
A senior Communist Party commissar in the navy, Wu Huayang, told the news agency that the incident had been "stirred up by the U.S.".
There have been no signs the fracas will derail broader political and economic negotiations while Washington and Beijing are preoccupied with the global financial crisis.
Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi is visiting Washington to lay the groundwork for a meeting between Chinese President Hu Jintao and President Barack Obama at the G20 summit next month.
But the tough comments from China's navy suggest Beijing is hardening its stance on claims to stretches of the South China Sea.
"According to international sea laws and rules, in this [exclusive economic] zone the ships of various countries can merely pass through freely," said Wu, the commissar.
Chinese officials have said the U.S. ship was carrying out illegal surveying activities.
U.S. National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told the U.S. Congress on Tuesday the Chinese had become more assertive in staking claims to international waters around economic zones and were "more military, aggressive, forward-looking than we saw a couple years before" in Southeast Asia and the South China Sea.
The United States accused China of harassing the U.S. ship, the Impeccable, in international waters off Hainan, site of a Chinese submarine base and other naval installations.
The American ship, an unarmed ocean surveillance vessel, was conducting routine operations in the South China Sea 75 miles (120 km) south of Hainan, according to the Pentagon.
But China insists the Impeccable's operations were neither routine nor legal.
"If people are loitering outside your bamboo fence and the owner goes out to check on things, and then they say you've violated their rights, what's the sense in that?" said Jin Mao, a Chinese vice admiral, according to the news agency.
(Editing by Dean Yates)
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