China drags Hawaii into debate

China is likening its construction of islands and placement of surface-to-air missiles in the South China Sea to the U.S. military presence in Hawaii.

“The U.S. has recently made quite a lot of remarks about militarization. It is actually trying to confuse the public,” China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a news conference Monday.

“There is no difference between China’s deployment of necessary national defense facilities on its own territory and the defense installation by the U.S. in Hawaii,” Hua said.

The defiant comments came a day before China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, is scheduled to visit U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in the United States.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest shot back at a news conference that “there is no other country that has a claim on Hawaii. But yet when you consider the land features in the South China Sea, there are a variety of overlapping territorial claims that a variety of countries have made on those features.”

Earnest said the Chinese government might have a disagreement about the claims that are made by other countries.

“That’s all the more reason that we believe that all of the parties should resolve their differences of opinion about this matter in a way that doesn’t provoke a military confrontation,” he said. “That is why we have urged all parties who are claimants to these features — the United States is not among them — but we’ve encouraged all of the countries that do have claims to resolve them in a peaceful, legal manner and to avoid confrontation and to seek to avoid escalating the tensions in that area of the world.”

The United States maintains that China’s territorial claims to much of the South China Sea, including contested islands and reefs in the Paracels and Spratlys, are spurious.

Kerry recently criticized Beijing for increasing militarization after it was revealed China had deployed HQ-9 air defense missiles to Woody island in the Paracels.

CHINA, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Brunei and the Philippines have competing claims in the South China Sea, but China’s land reclamation efforts to build artificial islands — not recognized as Chinese territory by the United States — had reached almost 3,000 acres by last summer.

Kerry said Feb. 17 that the standard that should be applied to all countries with South China Sea interests is no militarization.

“But there is evidence every day that there has been an increase of militarization of one kind or another” by China, Kerry said. “It’s of serious concern.”

The United States is worried that China’s land reclamation could have far-reaching U.S. security and economic consequences if China disrupts international law protecting freedom of navigation. More than $5.3 trillion in global sea-based trade passes annually through the South China Sea.

Mischief Reef in the Spratly islands, where China is building an airstrip and possible naval base, is less than 150 nautical miles from Palawan in the Philippines and about 600 miles from China’s southern Hainan island.

THE SO-CALLED “dashed line” maps China relies on to make claims to the region appear to have originated in 1935 from its Land and Water Maps Inspection Committee and again in 1947 from the nationalist government, according to the State Department.

“China has not clarified through legislation, proclamation, or other official statements the legal basis or nature of its claim associated with the dashed-line map,” the State Department said in late 2014.

The United States “is not a party concerned in the South China Sea dispute,” said Hua, China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, adding that America should “stop sensationalizing” the issue.

The islands in the South China Sea have been part of China “since ancient times,” she said. China is entitled to safeguard its territorial sovereignty and maritime interests and rights.

China has created man-made islands “mainly for civilian purposes of providing better public services and goods for the international community,” she said. “China’s deployment of limited defense facilities on its own territory is its exercise of self-defense right to which a sovereign state is entitled under international law. It has nothing to do with militarization.”