US Destroyer Entered PLA Naval Exercise Zone Despite Warning: China

A U.S. destroyer USS Mustin allegedly lurking near Xisha islands in the hotly contested South China Sea (SCS), was expelled by the Chinese Navy which was holding exercises.

Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has accused the battleship of trespassing into its territorial waters on August 27, despite being warned to drive away.

Senior Colonel Li Huamin, a spokesperson for the PLA Southern Theater Command, remarked that the U.S. Navy ignored rules of the international law and repeatedly stirred up trouble in the SCS. “The U.S. Navy exercised navigational hegemony in the name of freedom of navigation, seriously undermined China's sovereignty and security interests, and severely sabotaged the international navigation order in the South China Sea,” Li was quoted as saying by Global Times Friday.

"We urge the U.S. to stop this kind of provocative action, to strictly manage maritime and aerial military operations and strictly restrain its frontline troops, so as to avoid accidents," Li added.

A day earlier, foreign media reported that China fired DF-21D and DF-26B missiles into the disputed sea. “In effect, China is saying, ‘If the U.S. puts two carriers in the South China Sea, we send aircraft carrier-killer missiles there,” Carl Schuster, an adjunct faculty member of Hawaii Pacific University’s diplomacy and military science program and a former operations director at U.S. Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center, was quoted as saying by Bloomberg.

China has also protested American U-2 Dragon Lady spy plane’s entry into a no-fly zone during live-fire drills on August 25.