Beijing demanded an end to US surveillance near China on Thursday after two of its fighter jets carried out what the Pentagon said was an "unsafe" intercept of a US military reconnaissance aircraft over the South China Sea. The incident, likely to increase tension in and around the contested waterway, took place in international airspace on Tuesday as the plane carried out "a routine US patrol," a Pentagon statement said.
A US Defense official said two Chinese J-11 fighter jets flew within 50 feet (15 meters) of the US EP-3 aircraft. The official said the incident took place east of Hainan island. "Initial reports characterised the incident as unsafe," the Pentagon statement said.
"It must be pointed out that US military planes frequently carry out reconnaissance in Chinese coastal waters, seriously endangering Chinese maritime security," China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei Hong told reporters. "We demand that the United States immediately cease this type of close reconnaissance activity to avoid having this sort of incident happening again," Hong said.
Speaking at a regular press briefing, he described the Pentagon statement as "not true" and said the actions of the Chinese aircraft were "completely in keeping with safety and professional standards." "They maintained safe behaviour and did not engage in any dangerous action," Hong said.
The encounter comes a week after China scrambled fighter jets as a US Navy ship sailed close to a disputed reef in the South China Sea. Another Chinese intercept took place in 2014 when a Chinese fighter pilot flew acrobatic manoeuvres around a US spy plane. The intercept occurred days before President Barack Obama travels to parts of Asia from May 21-28, including a Group of Seven summit in Japan and his first trip to Vietnam. China claims most of the South China Sea, through which $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year. The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei have overlapping claims.
Washington has accused Beijing of militarising the South China Sea after creating artificial islands, while Beijing, in turn, has criticised increased US naval patrols and exercises in Asia. The Pentagon statement said the Department of Defense was addressing the issue through military and diplomatic channels. China's Defense Ministry said in a fax that it was looking into reports on the incident.
In 2015, the United States and China announced agreements on a military hotline and rules of behaviour to govern air-to-air encounters called the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea (CUES). "This is exactly the type of irresponsible and dangerous intercepts that the air-to-air annex to CUES is supposed to prevent," said Greg Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank.
Poling said either some part of China's air force "hadn't gotten the message," or it was meant as a signal of displeasure with recent US freedom of navigation actions in the South China Sea. "If the latter, it would be very disappointing to find China sacrificing the CUES annex for political gamesmanship." Zhang Baohui, a security expert at Hong Kong's Lingnan University, said he believed the encounter highlighted the limitation of CUES, and shows that Chinese pilots would still fly close to US surveillance planes if needed. "Frankly, we're always going to see these kinds of incidents as China will always put the priority on national security over something like CUES whenever it feels its interests are directly threatened," he said.
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