 "US President-elect Donald Trump walks off his plane")
The Pentagon said China will return a US Navy underwater drone after its military scooped up the submersible in the South China Sea late this week and sparked a row that drew in President-elect Donald Trump, who said on Twitter the Chinese stole it, so they can keep it.
“Through direct engagement with Chinese authorities, we have secured an understanding that the Chinese will return the UUV to the United States,” Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement on Saturday, referring to the unmanned underwater vehicle the US said had been operating in international waters.
China’s ministry of defence pledged an “appropriate” return of the drone on its Weibo social media account, while also criticising the US for hyping the incident into a diplomatic row. It followed assurances from Beijing that the governments were working to resolve the spat, punctuated by a tweet from Trump denouncing the seizure as “unprecedented.”
The drone incident was disclosed by the Pentagon on Friday. China’s ministry said the US “hyped the case in public,” which it said wasn’t helpful in resolving the problem. The US has “frequently” sent its vessels and aircrafts into the region, and China urges such activities to stop, the ministry said in its Weibo message.
Trump slammed the Chinese navy’s capture of the vehicle in a message to his 17.4 million Twitter followers.
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“China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters — rips it out of the water and takes it to China in an unprecedented act,” Trump wrote Saturday hours after the Chinese government said it had been in touch with the US military about the incident.
In a follow-up Twitter message, the president-elect said: “We should tell China that we don’t want the drone they stole back — let them keep it!”
The tensions unleashed by the episode underscored the delicate state of relations between the two countries, weeks before Trump’s inauguration. Trump has threatened higher tariffs on Chinese products and questioned the US approach to Taiwan, which Beijing considers part of its territory. Meanwhile, China is growing more assertive over its claims to disputed sections of the South China Sea.
“China and the US are using their military channels to properly handle this case,” China’s foreign ministry said in a statement sent to Bloomberg earlier on Saturday. The Global Times, a newspaper affiliated with the Communist Party, cited a Chinese military official saying the drone was taken during a security check and predicted that the incident would likely be “resolved successfully.”
Not everyone in Chinese was conciliatory, however.
People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, said in a commentary on its WeChat account that the drone had been found in sensitive waters near Scarborough Shoal, and was conducting military operations.
“No doubt that UUV was missioned to detect submarines, it might even have followed submarines,” the paper said in the article published late Saturday. “The region is a gray zone, and if the US Navy’s drone could come over, the Chinese could capture and seize it.”
Beijing could ask Washington to apologise because the drone was damaging the safety of Chinese people and ships, the newspaper said. “Hello the United States, the Christmas gift that you left in the South China Seas has been received, please don’t worry.”
The Defense Department said a Chinese naval ship unlawfully seized the small unmanned vehicle Thursday while the USNS Bowditch, a US Navy survey ship, picked up the drone in a routine operation 50 nautical miles (93 kilometres) north-west of Subic Bay in the Philippines.
The seizure was “one of the most brazen actions that the PLA Navy has taken against US Navy for a very long time,” said Ashley Townshend, a research fellow at the US studies centre at the University of Sydney. “Against a background of rising tensions in the South China Sea and Trump’s increasingly hawkish comments on China policy, this incident will be a serious test for US-China relations.”
Bloomberg
