The Liaoning carrier and its flotilla of escorting frigates and destroyers were apparently on their way back to base in northeastern China from the South China Sea following training exercises, the agency reported.
The Chinese vessels moved through waters off Shantou in the southeastern Chinese province of Guangdong early Wednesday morning and continued north, CNA reported, citing the defense ministry.
The agency said the ships remained « west of the median line of the Taiwan Strait, » or closer to mainland China.
By Thursday morning, the Liaoning carrier had completed its passage through the strait, the news agency reported.
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, who is in Nicaragua, has been briefed about the situation and requested that officials in Taipei closely monitor the movements of the Chinese vessels, CNA said.
Tsa i drew anger from China when she met senior US Republicans including Senator Ted Cruz in Houston on Sunday en route to Central America during a controversial transit stop that Beijing had asked the United States to not allow.
Relations between Taiwan, China and the US have been strained since President-elect Donald Trump spoke to Tsai in a phone call in December, upending decades of diplomatic protocol.
China views Taiwan as a renegade province and, since 1979, the US has acknowledged Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is part of China, with US-China relations governed by a set of protocols known as the « one China » policy.
Provocative move?
Analysts said it was the second time China’s aircraft carrier had navigated the strait, and, despite rising tensions between the two, the move shouldn’t automatically be seen as provocative.
« China conducted the exercises in the South China Sea more for operational readiness purposes than political, although political is never out of the picture when the PLA Navy goes to sea, » said Carl Schuster, a professor at Hawaii Pacific University and former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.
The Liaoning carrier’s J-15 fighter jets last month practiced air confrontations and air refueling in the Yellow Sea late before the ship and its flotilla headed into the open Pacific beyond Taiwan and Okinawa.
China’s state-run Global Times media agency published an editorial on Christmas Day, timed to coincide with the aircraft carrier Liaoning’s maneuvers.
The piece called on China to build up its fleet of aircraft carriers, make them combat-ready, sail them to the eastern Pacific and look to set up naval supply bases in South America.
The Global Times also said the drill is a sign the Liaoning’s combat capability has been enhanced and its areas of operation expanded, and could soon include the eastern Pacific. That would extend to the seas off the West Coast of the US.
The South China Sea is home to a string of messy territorial disputes that pit multiple countries against each other.
Tensions have ratcheted up as China has reclaimed land in massive dredging operations, turning sandbars into islands equipped with airfields, ports and lighthouses.
Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam all dispute sovereignty of several island chains and nearby waters in the South China Sea — with rival claims to the Chinese interpretation.

© Source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_asia/~3/ZUodb15WclU/index.html
All rights are reserved and belongs to a source media.

The central government looked into 33,000 cases of potential violations of environmental protection laws in 2016, according to data disclosed at a national environment work conference, as cited  by state news outlet Xinhua. 
Fines totaling 440 million yuan (US$63.6 million) were handed down, and 720 arrests were made.
The inspections took place in several provinces and municipalities, including Beijing and Shanghai.
The agency went on to state that the government refused 11 high-pollution and high-energy consuming projects in 2016, involving total investments of 97 billion yuan ($14 billion).
It also said that 4.05 million high emission vehicles were taken off China’s roads last year, which, in part, caused pollution levels to drop.
It comes just one week after smog levels in China reached historic levels, with as many as 32 cities under ‘red alert’ – the country’s most severe pollution warning. Two other red alerts in Beijing forced the closures of schools and factories in December, and half the city’s cars being banned from the roads.
The year 2016 marked the third year of China’s ‘war on pollution.’
Meanwhile, the central government also put forth a national plan on environmental improvement for the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020) last month, which outlined detailed plans to tackle polluted air, water, and soil.
In another attempt to combat its pollution problem, China – the world’s largest consumer of coal – has also announced that the country will spend $360 billion on renewable energy projects, turning to solar and wind power.
China’s pollution has been blamed on a number of factors, most of them related to the country’s rapid growth over the course of a few decades, and the lack of green technologies to handle such growth. Of all of the culprits, burning coal has been linked to the largest number of premature deaths – 366,000 in 2013.
Beijing’s levels are made worse by geography, as the city is bordered by the Xishan and Yanshan mountains. When a high pressure system moves in, air near Beijing’s surface doesn’t move up and over the mountains, but rather remains stagnant, becoming more and more polluted, according to AccuWeather. As a result, residents continue to breathe the bad air.

© Source: https://www.rt.com/news/373467-china-pollution-fines-arrests/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
All rights are reserved and belongs to a source media.

The US cannot block Chinese access to the man-made islands in the South China Sea as suggested by the secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson at Wednesday’s Senate confirmation hearing, Chinese experts said on Thursday. Any attempt to do so would only prompt China to step up military build up and even set up Air Defence Identification Zone in the disputed waters, they added. The former ExxonMobil CEO said that China’s “illegal” building of islands and equipping them with military assets was “akin to Russia’s taking Crimea” from Ukraine. “We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed,” he told the hearing. In response, Wu Xinbo, head of American Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University said “What’s been built has been built… It should be noted that rising American military pressure could be used to justify China’s military deployment.” Yuan Zheng, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of American Studies, said he did not think Tillerson would dares to implement what he suggested at the hearing. “I don’t think the US will stop China from accessing its own islands in the South China Sea,” Yuan said. “China is not Cuba, and the South China Sea is not the Caribbean. The South China Sea is not under the US sphere of influence, it’s China’s territorial waters.” China might set up an Air Defence Identification Zone if the US proceeded to try blocking China’s access to the islands, Yuan added. Wu said the US had few options other than continuing or intensifying its “freedom of navigation operations” with their warships in the waters, which are disputed by six countries, rather than to deny China’s access. Because the US is not one of the claimants, it would have very limited legal grounds to proceed further than that, Yuan said. Both Yuan and Wu believe that Tillerson took a hardline stance against Beijing at his confirmation hearing before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee to make up for his lack of diplomatic experience. Such tough talk can only negatively impact Sino-US relations,” Yuan said. “But he’s saying what Congress loves to hear.” China would also retaliate if the US unilaterally upgraded current UN sanctions imposed on North Korea to punish Chinese companies who violated the sanctions to deal with North Korea, as Tillerson indicated at the hearing, the experts said. Tillerson blamed China for not being “reliable” and using its full influence to put pressure on North Korea over its nuclear and missile programmes, and supported imposing “secondary sanctions” on Chinese entities found to be violating sanctions. “If China will to comply with the UN sanctions, then it’s appropriate … for the United States to consider actions to compel them to comply,” Tillerson said at the hearing. Zhang Tuosheng, director of the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies at the China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies said Tillerson’s words reflected Washington’s waning patience towards the North Korean problem, but it may not work. “If the Trump administration is going to implement such policies, the situation of Korea peninsula is bound to worsen,” Zhang said. Wu said the Obama administration had already imposed secondary sanctions on a Chinese company in the border city of Dandong in Liaoning province over its business dealings with North Korea. But China would not accept further conditions that exceed the requirements of the existing UN resolutions. “If the US unilaterally raises the terms of the UN sanctions and penalises Chinese companies, China will oppose such moves and even retaliate,” Wu said. Tillerson said Washington needed to reaffirm its commitment to Taiwan and also accused China of failing to live up to global agreements on trade and intellectual property. But Tillerson also stressed the “deeply intertwined” nature of the world’s two biggest economies. “We should not let disagreements over other issues exclude areas for productive partnership,” he said. Yuan said Tillerson’s words partially reflected his “his weaknesses in diplomacy and lack of public service”. Wu said the Trump administration will only learn diplomacy through experience, and that many uncertainties remained. “Their diplomacy is still far from mature,” he said.

© Source: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2061560/beijing-will-retaliate-if-us-tries-block-chinas-access
All rights are reserved and belongs to a source media.

Asked whether he was in favor of Washington taking a tougher stance toward China, the former ExxonMobil CEO replied: “ We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.”
Tillerson did not elaborate on how exactly Beijing might be blocked from the artificial islands but said he considered its South China Sea activity  » extremely worrisome.  »  It would be a threat to the  » entire global economy » if Beijing were able to dictate access to the waterway, he added.
Tillerson branded as « illegal » the Chinese declaration of an air defense zone in the East China Sea, which Beijing contests with Japan.
« They’re taking territory or control, or declaring control of territories that are not rightfully China’s,  » he said.
The former CEO, 64, blamed the situation on what he called an inadequate response from the outgoing Obama administration.
« The failure of a response has allowed them [China] just to keep pushing the envelope on this, » he said.
« The way we’ve got to deal with this is we’ve got to show back up in the region with our traditional allies in Southeast Asia, » Tillerson noted.
A bid to blockade China’s man-made islands would be a significant step that Washington has up to now not raised even as an option.
« This is the sort of off-the-cuff remark akin to a tweet that pours fuel on the fire and maybe makes things worse,” Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra, told Bloomberg. « Short of going to war with China, there is nothing the Americans can do,  » he added.
The Center for International and Strategic Studies, a US think tank, said in a report released in mid-December that recent satellite images appear to show that China has installed anti-aircraft and anti-missile weapons on all seven of China’s newly-created islands. “ China appears to have built significant point-defense capabilities, in the form of large anti-aircraft guns and probable close-in weapons systems (CIWS), at each of its outposts in the Spratly Islands,” it said.
The South China Sea, a waterway of strategic importance through which some $5 trillion of trade passes each year, has been at the center of tensions between multiple nations contesting waterway and offshore resources. China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan – which Beijing considers part of its territory – have overlapping claims in the region. Last year in July, a United Nations court of arbitration ruled that there was no evidence that China historically had exclusive control over the waters or resources, hence there was “ no legal basis for China to claim historic rights. ” Beijing continues to claim the reefs in defiance of a Hague International Arbitration Court verdict.
Washington has intensified constant warship maneuvering near the artificial islands that Beijing has built, arguing that sailing and flights over the disputed waters are conducted according to the principle of Freedom of Navigation (FON). Meanwhile, according to a report by the National Institute for South China Sea Studies (NISCSS), China has recently become the “ No. 1 targeted country” of the US in terms of close reconnaissance.
More than 700 patrols were conducted by US vessels and aircraft in the South China Sea region in 2015.
“Such activities have not only threatened China’s national security, damaged China’s relevant maritime rights and interests and undermined Sino-US strategic mutual trust, but is also very likely to lead to accidental collisions at sea or in the air,” the  report by the government think tank noted in November.
Tensions escalated last month after a Chinese naval vessel spotted and seized a piece of “unidentified equipment” in the South China Sea, which turned out to an underwater US drone.
US President-elect Trump accused Beijing of “stealing” the device. “China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters – rips it out of water and takes it to China in unprecedented act,” Trump tweeted.
« We should tell China that we don’t want the drone they stole back – let them keep it!” he wrote in another tweet. According to Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis, the drone was seized while collecting unclassified scientific data.
“It is ours,” he told reporters at the time of the incident, adding that the device was worth about $150,000. “It’s clearly marked as ours. We would like it back, and we would like this not to happen again,” Davis noted.
Beijing accused the US of repeatedly dispatching vessels and aircraft to carry out “close-in reconnaissance and military survey within Chinese waters, but later promised to return the device, criticizing Washington for “hyping up” the incident.

© Source: https://www.rt.com/news/373431-tillerson-china-access-islands/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
All rights are reserved and belongs to a source media.

Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump’s pick for U. S. Secretary of State, had indicated he’s in favor of using military force to evict China from the man-made islands it’s built in the disputed South China Sea.
A former CEO of American oil giant ExxonMobil, Tillerson made these remarks during his confirmation hearing at the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee on Jan. 11. His statements are the first time a U. S. administration has indicated its readiness to use military force to stop China’s relentless « sea grab » in the South China Sea.
Like Us on Facebook
His predecessor, John Kerry, consistently tried to reason with China to stop its island construction and militarization of these islands but to no avail. The effete Barack Obama consistently refused to take tougher action against China to defend his pledge not to ignite any war during his watch.
China is currently speeding-up the militarization of the islands it’s reclaimed. It’s poised to deploy over the next few months modern surface-to-air missile systems on the most strategically important of these islands.
China has reclaimed over 3,000 acres of land in the Spratly Islands since 2014. It’s transformed reefs and sandbars into man-made islands equipped with military airfields, radar stations and anti-aircraft sites.
On July 12, 2016, the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague declared illegal China’s claim to own most of the South China Sea based on its alleged « historic rights.  » China has refused to accept the court’s judgment and stands in violation of it to this day.
 » We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that first, the island-building stops, and second, your access to those islands also not going to be allowed, » he said.
The statement implies the use of military force to enforce it.
Tillerson also saw China’s activity in the South China Sea as « extremely worrisome.  »
He compared China’s territorial claims over the South China Sea to Russia’s military annexation of the Crimea , which belong to Ukraine, in March 2014.
« Building islands and then putting military assets on those islands is akin to Russia’s taking of Crimea. It’s taking of territory that others lay claim to, » Tillerson pointed out.
Tillerson noted the Obama administration neglected to tackle the problem. He said the « failure of a response has allowed them (China) to just keep pushing the envelope on this.  »
Tillerson’s testimony, plus Trump’s known hostility towards China, apparently makes it clear the Trump administration will do more than talk tough to China.
Tillerson also took a dig at Obama’s proclivity for inaction and penchant for being outmaneuvered by the Russians.
« I think a lot of our troubles today are that we do not enforce — we make commitments, we say we are going to do something and then we don’t enforce it, » said Tillerson.
China’s first response to Tillerson’s tougher rhetoric was surprisingly muted. It again repeated the worn line the U. S. should stay out of the dispute in the South China Sea and leave it all to China.

© Source: http://www.chinatopix.com/articles/109870/20170112/tillerson-signals-willingness-use-military-force-against-china-south-sea.htm
All rights are reserved and belongs to a source media.