Freed From Shoals, Warship Heads Back to China - New York Times

BEIJINGâ€" A Chinese naval warship that ran aground in a chain of disputed islands near the Philippines has successfully extricated itself and is on its way back to China, according to statement from the Chinese Defense Ministry.

The statement, posted Sunday on the ministry’s Web site, said the ship, with the aid of other naval ships and rescue teams, removed itself from Half Moon Shoal at 5 a.m. that day. It had minor damage to the bow, none of the crew was injured and no oil had been spilled, the ministry said. The ship had been on a patrol.

The shoal is in the resource-rich chain of islands called the Spratlys, which China claims as its own. But several Southeast Asian nations and Taiwan also claim territorial rights, and the disputes have become a continuing source of friction in the region. Vietnam and the Philippines have been the most vocal in opposing Chinese claims. Tensions between the Philippines and China became heightened this spring when both countries refused to recall fishing boats and government vessels from Scarborough Shoal, in the disputed area. A typhoon last month forced the Philippine ships to withdraw, but Chinese ships have remained in the area.

The Chinese naval ship that ran aground did so last Wednesday on Half Moon Shoal, about 60 miles from the province of Palawan in the Philippines. The accident was seen as an embarrassment for China. Officials from the Philippines have not protested the presence of the Chinese ship, but said they were investigating the incident.

Global Times, a popular state-run Chinese newspaper with a nationalistic tone, published an editorial on Monday by Maj. Gen. Luo Yuan that chastised people for making “a big fuss” over “a minor incident.” Referring to the grounding ofthe naval vessel, he said: “Having problems during a normal period is way better than having problems during war.”

Meanwhile, thirty Chinese fishing vessels accompanied by a government ship have set sail for another shoal in the Spratlys, according to a report on Sunday by Xinhua, the state news agency, which cited People’s Liberation Army Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese military.

China and Southeast Asian nations have been encouraging fishing vessels to ply the disputed waters in order to reinforce claims to the territory. Foreign analysts say the fishing vessels often coordinate with fisheries enforcement agencies, other maritime law ships and naval vessels to present a united front in the South China Sea. (The sea goes by different names among the competing countries â€" it is South Sea to the Chinese and East Sea to the Vietnamese, for example, while South China Sea is a Western designation.)

On some Chinese maps, a line of nine dashes, sometimes called the cow’s tongue, encompasses the entire sea and delineates China’s territory. The original map was drawn up by officials of the Kuomintang, which ruled China before the Communist takeover of 1949, and the Communists have adopted the same map. But on occasion, Chinese foreign ministry officials have said China does not necessarily claim all the waters in the sea, but just the land features and the rights to exclusive economic zones off the land features. Some foreign analysts say that such claims encompass the vast majority of areas rich in potential oil and gas reserves and fisheries.

Last week, an annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ended without any diplomatic statement being issued over the South China Sea. China has long said that the territorial disputes should be resolved in bilateral negotiations, not in a multilateral setting. Some diplomats in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, which hosted the conference, said that China pressured Cambodia, considered a close ally of China, to block moves by some of the other 10 participating nations toward issuing a united statement. One diplomat pointed to an article last Thursday by Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, in which China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, was quoted as thanking Cambodia’s prime minister for supporting China’s “core interests.”