Chinese Weapons Spotted on Disputed Island, U.S. Says

Singapore: The United States has spotted a pair of mobile artillery vehicles on an artificial island that China is building in the South China Sea, a resource-rich stretch of ocean crossed by vital shipping lanes, U.S. officials said.

China's construction program on previously uninhabited atolls and reefs in the Spratly Islands has already raised alarm and drawn protests from other countries in the region, whose claims to parts of the South China Sea overlap China's.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter called this week for China to halt the construction, saying that international law did not recognize Chinese claims of sovereignty over the new territories and that U.S. warships and military aircraft would continue to operate in the area.

The artillery was spotted by satellites and surveillance aircraft about a month ago, and the two vehicles have since been either hidden or removed, according to U.S. officials who spoke about intelligence matters on the condition of anonymity.

"It is unclear whether they have been removed," one of the officials said.

Another said that even if the weapons are still on the island, they pose no threat to U.S. naval forces or aircraft in the region, although the guns could reach some nearby islands claimed by other countries.

With Carter in Singapore to attend the Shangri-La Dialogue, a high-profile annual Asian security meeting that Chinese officials are also attending, U.S. officials were reluctant to publicly discuss the intelligence they had collected about the artillery.

Brent Colburn, a spokesman traveling with Carter, would say only that the United States was aware of the weapons, whose detection was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, criticized China's deployment of artillery on the island as "a disturbing development and escalatory development."

"Their actions are in violation of international law, and their actions are going to be condemned by everyone in the world," McCain was quoted by Reuters as saying in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where he stopped on Friday on his way to Singapore for the security conference.

"We are not going to have a conflict with China," he said, "but we can take certain measures which will be a disincentive to China to continue these kinds of activities."

There was no immediate comment from Chinese officials about the weapons.

A top Chinese military official, Adm. Sun Jianguo, is scheduled to speak at the conference in Singapore about Chinese military policies. Admiral Sun, the deputy chief of staff of the People's Liberation Army, which includes the navy, will lead the strongest delegation of military officials that China has yet sent to the annual forum.

China released a military strategy document earlier this week that, for the first time, called for its navy to project force beyond its coastal waters into the open oceans. Western officials said because of its timing, the document seemed intended as a challenge to other participants in the conference.

The heightened tensions between the United States and China over the South China Sea were on display last week when the United States sent a surveillance plane close to Fiery Cross Reef, which China has built into an island with a runway that military aircraft can use. The Chinese told the U.S. plane to leave the area, according to a CNN television crew that was aboard the flight at the Pentagon's invitation.

When a U.S. littoral combat ship, the Fort Worth, conducted a weeklong patrol of waters near the Spratly Islands, including Fiery Cross Reef, a Chinese guided missile frigate, the Yancheng, followed the U.S. vessel for a time, the Pentagon announced. Other U.S. warships will conduct similar patrols, which will be the "new normal" for the Navy in the South China Sea, the Pentagon said.

China has said that it was building the artificial islands in the sea largely for civilian purposes, but it has not denied that it also envisions a military role for them.

In April, Hua Chunying, the spokeswoman for China's foreign ministry, told reporters that the islands would be used to aid the country's defense, although she did not provide details. "Such constructions are within China's sovereignty and are fair, reasonable, lawful and do not affect nor target any country, and are beyond reproach," she said.

The United States disagrees, and U.S. officials have stressed in recent days that the U.S.-dominated security order in the region should be respected because it has brought calm and prosperity.

The implication is that China is threatening to upend that system, but the U.S. officials have hesitated to say so directly, preferring to talk in generalities about all countries needing to find diplomatic solutions to their disputes in the South China Sea.

Still, U.S. officials have not been shy about pointing out that China has created roughly 2,000 acres of new land in the South China Sea, three quarters of it this year. The United States has also released video images taken by surveillance aircraft showing Chinese ships and dredges building runways and harbors on remote outcroppings in the sea.

The island-building has been a major concern of the United States and of Southeast Asian nations for more than a year, and Carter is not the first Pentagon leader to say so at a regional security forum.

At last year's Shangri-La Dialogue, Chuck Hagel, who was then the secretary of defense, said that China was engaged in "destabilizing, unilateral actions asserting its claims in the South China Sea." The Philippines has protested to China over island-building at two reefs since last spring, and in June 2014, President Benigno S. Aquino III spoke publicly about the movements of Chinese ships that he said could be involved in similar work at two other sites.

The Philippines and Vietnam each have claims of their own in the South China Sea, and each built structures long ago on islets or reefs there. China has cited that history to defend its own construction.

But analysts say that those two countries did not build islands, and in any case their structures were generally built before 2002, when China and nine Southeast Asian nations signed a nonbinding agreement calling on all of them to "exercise self-restraint in the conduct of activities" and to refrain from trying to inhabit any land features that were uninhabited at that time.

The most developed of China's newly expanded land formations a year ago was Johnson South Reef, which China seized in 1988 after killing about 70 Vietnamese soldiers and sailors.

U.S. and Southeast Asian officials are worried that China might try to claim an exclusive economic zone in waters within 200 nautical miles of the new land formations, which they argue are ineligible for measuring such zones.