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Snubbed in world’s biggest war game, will Beijing make waves in South China Sea?
Twenty-six nations are engaging in the massive US-led naval exercise known as RIMPAC. And China isn’t one of them
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The resource-rich Spratly and Paracel archipelagos may be the main sticking points in the South China Sea territorial dispute – but this week the world’s two major powers were shadowboxing over the issue thousands of kilometres away in Beijing and the Western Pacific.
On the Chinese side, the fresh missive came from President Xi Jinping as he warned the visiting US Secretary of Defence James Mattis that while Beijing – a claimant to the contested waters – was committed to peace, it would not yield “an inch” of ancestral territory.
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The Americans’ oblique salvo of sorts coincided with the beginning of the Rim of the Pacific Exercise (RIMPAC), a five-week multilateral naval drill from which the Chinese navy was ejected as a form of protest from Washington against Beijing’s military build-up in the South China Sea.
Billed as the world’s biggest maritime war game, the biennial exercise near Hawaii and the western Pacific Ocean features US navy vessels patrolling alongside warships from 25 countries.
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The renewed, albeit low-key sparring between the two major powers comes as no surprise for veteran observers of the decades-old South China Sea dispute, but some say they were alarmed at hardening positions on both sides.
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