In a statement late Saturday, the Chinese Defense Ministry said it was in talks with the United States but criticized Washington for what it called an “inappropriate” exaggeration of the dispute. The American reaction, it said, is “not conducive to solving the problem smoothly.”
“We hereby express regrets for that,” it said.
Although the ministry said the drone would be returned to the United States in a “proper way,” the statement stopped short of saying when or how the device, which Chinese and American analysts say was most likely used to gather intelligence about Chinese submarine activity in contested waters, would be returned, or if it would be handed back intact.
President-elect Donald J. Trump entered the fray Saturday morning, accusing China on Twitter of acting improperly. “China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters — rips it out of water and takes it to China in unprecedented act,” he said.
The overseas edition of The People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, said on its social media account Saturday night that the Chinese capture of the drone was legal because rules about drone activities had not been clearly written. “This is the gray area,” the newspaper said. “If the U.S. military can send the drone, surely China can seize it.”
In its statement, the Defense Ministry scolded the United States over what it called its longstanding practice of conducting “close-in reconnaissance and military surveys” in waters claimed by China. The Chinese government has often complained to senior American officials, including President Obama, that the United States repeatedly intrudes by air and ship into waters close to China. The ministry’s statement reiterated the complaint, saying “China firmly opposes it and urges the U.S. side to stop such operations.”
A Chinese naval vessel seized the drone, which had been launched on Thursday from an American ship, the Bowditch, in waters off the Philippines. The American crew was in the process of retrieving the device when a small boat dispatched from the Chinese vessel took it as the American sailors looked on.
China’s historical
territorial claim
Approximate site of incident
The action came two weeks after Mr. Trump angered Beijing by speaking by phone to the leader of Taiwan, and almost a week after he criticized China for building military bastions in the South China Sea. American officials were trying to determine whether the seizure was a response to Mr. Trump or whether it was just one more escalatory step in China’s long-term plan to try to push the United States Navy out of the South China Sea, one of the world’s busiest commercial and military waterways.
The Pentagon formally protested the capture of the drone, saying it was stolen American military property. The Pentagon said the drone had been carrying out scientific research, and asked China to return it. American experts, however, said the drone might have been designed to help follow China’s submarine buildup, a critical part of the country’s growing naval strength as it seeks unfettered control of the South China Sea and unimpeded access to the Pacific and Indian oceans.
A retired Chinese rear admiral, Yang Yi, speaking earlier at a conference sponsored by a state-run newspaper, The Global Times, said the Americans had invited the Chinese sailors to take the drone by sailing in the waters close to the Scarborough Shoal, fishing grounds that are claimed by China and the Philippines.
The Americans “deliver these things to our home,” and it would be more than natural for Chinese sailors to seize the drone and examine it, Admiral Yang said.
“If Trump and the American government dare to take actions to challenge the bottom line of China’s policy and core interests,” he said, “we must drop any expectations about him and give him a bloody nose.”
Reached by telephone, the president of a state-affiliated think tank, Wu Shicun, said the United States had most likely been conducting intelligence reconnaissance to detect Chinese submarine routes in the South China Sea. Mr. Wu, who heads the National Institute for South China Sea Studies and advises the government on maritime matters, described the drone “as a new way for the United States to conduct intelligence gathering.”
“Previously the United States conducted surveillance with warships in the nearby waters of China, or by aircraft,” he said. “Now the unmanned underwater vehicle is a new approach.” The Chinese were justified in taking the unmanned underwater vehicle, he said.
The episode occurred in seas about 50 miles northwest of Subic Bay, a major port of the Philippines and a former United States Navy base, the Pentagon said. That means the Bowditch was within 200 miles of Scarborough Shoal, American analysts said.
The American vessel appeared to be outside the perimeter of the “nine-dash line,” said Mira Rapp-Hooper, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. China drew the line in the late 1940s as it laid claim to about 90 percent of the South China Sea.
“China has no legal basis to take actions like these on the high seas, but doing so outside Beijing’s ambiguous claim line is particularly egregious and will make the incident especially hard to justify,” Ms. Rapp-Hooper said.
The president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, who is nurturing warm ties with China and has warned he may break longstanding military relations with the United States, took a conciliatory approach over the Chinese action.
“I will not impose anything on China,” he said at a news conference in Manila on Saturday. “Why? Because politics in Southeast Asia is changing.” This was a reference to his tilt away from the United States, a treaty ally, since taking office in June. He referred to China as “the kindest soul of all.”
Photo
The drone was seized by Chinese sailors off the Philippines. CreditCmdr Santiago Carrizosa/United States Navy
The Philippines also took a forgiving attitude after the release of satellite images on Wednesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that appeared to show that China has installed weapons on the seven artificial islands it has built in the Spratly archipelago, not far from the Philippines in the South China Sea.
“There is nothing that we can do about that now, whether or not it is being done for purposes of further militarizing these facilities that they have put up,” the foreign secretary, Perfecto Yasay Jr., said, reflecting the weak state of the Philippines military. “We cannot stop China at this point in time and say, ‘Do not put that up.’ ”
By seizing the drone so close to the Philippines, China may have been trying to further weaken the already frayed United States alliance with Manila, American experts said.
The conciliatory reaction by the Philippines, even as the United States was making stern demands on Beijing, would complicate Washington’s efforts to convince China that its actions were unacceptable, a senior American military official said on Saturday.
In an important ruling in July, an international tribunal in The Hague decided against China, saying that the Scarborough Shoal was entitled only to a 12-mile territorial zone, not 200 miles as the Chinese assert. China has refused to recognize the ruling.
Mr. Duterte on Saturday said he was ignoring the Hague ruling even though the case had been brought by the previous Philippines government. “In the play of politics now, I will set aside the arbitral ruling,” he said.
The drone incident, according to a Pentagon account, began when a Chinese Navy vessel that was shadowing the Bowditch — a common practice in the South China Sea — pulled up not far from the ship. It then dispatched a small boat to seize the drone as the American crew was recovering it from the water. The Pentagon described the vehicle as an unclassified “ocean glider” system used to gather military oceanographic data such as salinity, water temperature and sound speed.
An American naval expert did not disagree with Mr. Wu’s notion of what the Americans were probably doing. “Warfare and surveillance in the age of drones has not yet developed an agreed-upon set of rules,” said Lyle J. Goldstein, an associate professor at the China Maritime Studies Institute at the United States Naval War College, in Rhode Island.
“This is increasingly a major problem as both China and the U.S. are deploying ever more air and naval drones into the contested waters and airspace of the Western Pacific,” he said.
The seizure may have been just another way for Beijing to provoke the United States in a gray zone, just under the threshold of actual hostilities, Mr. Goldstein said. He said it was a time for “cooler heads to prevail,” to halt a cycle of escalation that “cannot end well for either side.”
In some respects, the seizure was not a surprise but just another step in China’s increased harassment of the American Navy in the South China Sea, several American naval experts said.
In March 2009, soon after President Obama took office, five Chinese ships swarmed an American surveillance vessel, the Impeccable, 75 miles off Hainan island, the southernmost province of China. The Impeccable was towing sonar equipment designed for anti-submarine warfare, and the Chinese ships got as close as 25 feet from the ship in what the Pentagon called “illegal and dangerous” maneuvers.
Jane Perlez reported from Beijing, and Matthew Rosenberg from Washington. Felipe Villamor contributed reporting from Manila. Yufan Huang contributed research
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