BEIJING — Beijing accused Tokyo on Feb. 7 of mounting a smear campaign after Japan said a Chinese frigate had locked its weapons-targeting radar on a Japanese warship in a “threat of force”.
The world’s second- and third-largest economies are at loggerheads over uninhabited, Japanese-controlled islands in the East China Sea, known as Senkaku in Tokyo and Diaoyu by Beijing, which claims them. The radar incident, which Japan said happened last week, marked the first time the two nations’ navies have locked horns in a dispute that has some commentators warning about a possible armed conflict.
Asked to respond to Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera’s description of the radar targeting as a “threat of force,” Beijing foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said: “Recently Japan has been hyping up crisis and deliberately creating tension to smear China’s image.
“This move is counter to the improvement of relations,” she told a regular briefing. “The current problem is not China being assertive but about Japanese ships’ and airplanes’ repeated illegal activities in the airspace and waters of the Diaoyu islands, which undermine China’s territorial sovereignty.”
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