BEIJING -- The Chinese Navy on Tuesday handed back a U.S. underwater drone it had seized, returning the device to the United States.
A Chinese vessel returned the submersible drone to a U.S. Navy ship in international waters off the Philippines, near where the drone was taken Thursday, Defense Department spokesman Peter Cook said on the Pentagon's website.
Since the Pentagon disclosed the episode Friday and demanded the return of the ocean-monitoring device, U.S. and Chinese officials have engaged in rhetoric over the legality of the seizure, which took place roughly 500 miles from the coast of mainland China. In the latest announcement, Cook pressed home the official U.S. position.
"The incident was inconsistent with both international law and standards of professionalism for conduct between navies at sea," Cook said. He did not mention what condition the drone was in when it was returned.
President-elect Donald Trump, who has recently irked China with a string of blunt comments on diplomatic issues including Taiwan, trade and North Korea's nuclear weapons, also took up the dispute over the drone. On Saturday, Trump said on Twitter that the seizure was an "unprecedented act," and he later added: "We should tell China that we don't want the drone they stole back."
China's opaque policymaking, especially on military issues, has left outsiders guessing about who authorized the seizure, whether the act was meant to send a message, and, if so, whether that message was aimed at Trump.
The president-elect has drawn particular ire from Beijing for suggesting he could depart from the one-China principle, which blocks the U.S. from establishing formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan. The Chinese government insists that it has a sovereign right to Taiwan, which has its own democratically elected government.
"I see the snatched drone as a calculated act of coercive diplomacy approved at the top," Patrick Cronin, the senior director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, said in an email.
"I believe Beijing accelerated plans to create an early test for the new administration because Trump publicly called into question the one-China policy and because China judged it safer to provoke [President Barack] Obama than an unpredictable Trump," Cronin said.
The statement by Cook, the Pentagon spokesman, made clear that the episode would not shake U.S. determination to maintain a military presence in the South China Sea, where busy shipping lanes intersect with disputes over territorial claims. He said the United States would "continue to fly, sail and operate in the South China Sea wherever international law allows."
The Obama administration says the United States does not take sides in the territorial disputes but wants to preserve freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, including for U.S. Navy ships.
China's rapid buildup of naval and coast guard forces in the region, and its construction of military facilities on artificially created islands have alarmed Southeast Asian nations that also claim islands in the sea. The Chinese government hais said the U.S. presence there is provocative, and it said so again after the drone was seized.
"China firmly opposes the frequent appearance of U.S. military aircraft and vessels in waters facing China for close-in reconnaissance and military surveys," Hua Chunying, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told reporters in Beijing on Monday.
When reporters pressed Hua on China's reasoning, she asked: "Are you implying that the South China Sea is in the pocket of the United States?"
But a brief online statement on Tuesday from the Chinese Ministry of National Defense did not mention tensions over the U.S. presence, merely confirming that it had "smoothly completed" the return of the drone after "friendly consultations."
Chinese officials said their military had a right to pull the drone from the sea more than 50 miles northwest of Subic Bay in the Philippines. They said the Chinese ship did so out of safety concerns for passing vessels. Many foreign experts in international law have scoffed at that explanation.
But the dispute prompted an outburst of condemnation toward U.S. policy from Chinese commentators.
In a commentary published Monday, Fan Jinfa, a commodore with the Chinese Navy, said the seized drone was part of a U.S. effort to map and monitor conditions in the South China Sea to improve tracking of Chinese submarines.
"The undersea battleground, especially in the South China Sea, will become a new domain of Chinese-American rivalry," Fang wrote in the commentary published on the website of People's Daily, a newspaper. He said of the drone dispute: "The malign intent of the Americans in unilaterally and publicly stirring this up was glaringly clear."
A Section on 12/21/2016