China-Philippines Dispute Over Island Gets More Heated

BEIJING — China escalated its quarrel with the  over an island in the South China Sea on Thursday, halting Filipino bananas at customs for longer inspections and starting an official media campaign that suggested any claims on the island represented an infringement of Chinese sovereignty.

周四，中国升级了与菲律宾的冠以南中国海的争议，用更长的检查停止进口菲律宾的香蕉并且在媒体上展开战争，暗示任何关于黄岩岛的主权都代表侵犯了中国的主权。

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So far, China has not brought the United States into this renewed round of tension with the Philippines, but in the past few weeks the Chinese have said that the Philippines was daring to challenge China around an island in the South China Sea because of its alliance with Washington.

到目前为止，中国还没有让美国参与进这新一轮的与菲律宾的紧张关系中，但是在几个星期前，中国宣称菲律宾之所以敢于围绕南海的黄岩岛挑战中国是因为菲律宾与美国的联盟关系。

China and the Philippines have competing claims on the island, known as Huangyan Island by the Chinese and Panatag Shoal by the Philippines.

The South China Sea has become a major testing ground of China’s foreign policy and its growing maritime power, even as the top Communist Party leadership is preoccupied by a power struggle before the 18th Party Congress to be held this fall. Some Western analysts have suggested that Beijing’s increasing belligerence with the Philippines is aimed at shoring up domestic public opinion during a delicate transition period by using the issue of sovereignty as a popular rallying point.

The People’s Liberation Army Daily, the newspaper of the army, ran a tough editorial on Wednesday saying that China would not stand for anyone snatching the sovereignty of Huangyan Island. “Not only the Chinese government will not agree, neither will the Chinese people, and the Chinese Army will disagree even more,” the editorial said.

At the Foreign Ministry, a spokesman, Hong Lei, said at the regular briefing Thursday that the Philippines should stop escalating tensions and warned that Manila must take responsibility for the dispute over the island.

A new round in the long-standing quarrel began earlier in the week when Fu Ying, the vice minister of foreign affairs, told the chief Filipino diplomat in Beijing that Manila was “severely damaging the atmosphere of the bilateral relations between China and the Philippines.”

An account of the meeting between the Chinese official, Ms. Fu, and the chargé d’affaires of the Philippine Embassy in Beijing, Alex Chua, appeared prominently in the Chinese press.

Ms. Fu was quoted as urging the Philippines to withdraw all its vessels from the island waters and to stop operations against Chinese fishing boats and Chinese law enforcement vessels.

At sea, the dispute flared in early April when the Philippines said one of its warships had found eight Chinese fishing vessels near the disputed island. Filipino navy personnel boarded the Chinese fishing vessels where the Filipinos claimed they found large quantities of illegal coral and fish. Chinese surveillance ships arrived, preventing the arrest of the Chinese fishermen, the Philippines said at the time.

Soon afterward, the United States held annual maritime exercises with the Philippines exacerbating China’s arguments that Manila was acting with the support of its American ally.

The South China Sea has taken on a new importance for China in the past several years as a promising source of  and gas close to home.

A recent report on China’s involvement in the South China Sea by the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental research group that focuses on conflict resolution, noted that much of the attention on the sea stemmed not only from the issue of sovereignty but also “the region’s abundant natural resources and strategic location.”

The uncertainty of China’s legal claims and attempts to enforce sovereignty in areas that were far from what was reasonably considered to be part of China’s exclusive economic zone put China at odds with other claimants, including Vietnam and the Philippines, the report said.

On Wednesday, China’s largest offshore oil producer, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, began drilling a deep-sea well in an area about 200 miles southeast of Hong Kong. The drilling was not believed to be in hotly disputed waters. But the company announcement that it would drill for 56 days and was optimistic about finding oil was heralded in the Chinese press.

The drilling operation is using the first deep-sea drilling platform developed by its own engineers.

The extension of the dispute to banana imports came Thursday when a document by the Chinese government agency in charge of quarantining questionable food imports was made public on a Chinese Web site, saying that 1,200 containers of bananas from the Philippines had been held at various ports on the grounds of “quarantine concerns.” The quarantine agency urged local authorities to increase examinations for harmful organisms, the official Xinhua news agency said.

In what appeared to be another punitive economic action against the Philippines, the China International Travel Service, a large government-run travel agency, said it was postponing trips to the Philippines on grounds of safety. The Chinese Embassy in Manila warned Chinese citizens to be especially vigilant Saturday when it said anti Chinese rallies were planned in the Philippines.

Bree Feng contributed research.