Troubling sign of US allies' risk-laden acts of snooping: China Daily editorial

Canada and Australia, both allies of the United States, are clearly birds of a feather. Both have taken turns lately to smear China by accusing Chinese fighter aircraft of putting lives at risk by intercepting their military aircraft.

To justify their groundless accusations, both have deliberately played down the locations of where the encounters happened, never mind admitting what their militaries were really up to.

Perhaps even Ottawa and Canberra may feel embarrassed to admit the truth, which is their surveillance aircraft were poking their noses around China's territorial waters. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has twice complained about Canadian patrol planes in the East China Sea being buzzed by Chinese fighter jets in recent days, claims the Canadian surveillance was to monitor the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's compliance with sanctions.

Yet as a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said, the United Nations Security Council has never green-lighted any country carrying out military surveillance in the seas and airspace of other countries in the name of enforcing sanctions.

As for the similar close encounters between Chinese and Australian planes, the responsibility for any mishap would lie on the Australian side: On May 26, contrary to the disingenuous claims of Canberra that the plane was engaged in "routine maritime surveillance activity" in international airspace, an Australian P-8 anti-submarine patrol aircraft repeatedly approached the Chinese airspace around the Xisha Islands in the South China Sea for close-in reconnaissance despite repeated warnings from the Chinese military. The People's Liberation Army's Southern Theater Command mobilized naval and air forces to identify it and warn it off.

Such activities have indeed become routine, and China has good reason to ask what Canadian and Australian military craft are doing on its periphery so often. Such dangerous encounters would not happen if the Canadian and Australian militaries did not provocatively and irresponsibly come to ferret around China's periphery. It is extremely troubling that the two US allies in their enthusiasm to curry favor with Washington have heightened the frequency with which they engage in such risk-laden acts of snooping.

The shamelessness of their hypocritical cries of foul play is only bettered by the recent bleating of Canberra at the sighting of Chinese naval vessels sailing through international waters off the Australian coast.

Should China choose to conduct so-called freedom of navigation operations near the territorial waters of the US and its allies, it is not hard to imagine the uproar that would ensue.