China rattling its sabres in South China Sea ahead of ruling

China has kicked off a week of military drills in the South China Sea ahead of a hotly-anticipated and potentially destabilising court ruling on its territorial claims in the region.

CCTV, the country’s state broadcaster, said the manoeuvres were due to start at about 8am Beijing time on Tuesday.

At least two guided missile destroyers, the Shenyang and Ningbo, and one missile frigate, the Chaozhou, were reported to be among the vessels being deployed to the region, where China has overlapping territorial claims with Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

The exercises, inside a 100,000 square kilometre zone around the disputed Paracel Islands, come ahead of a ruling next week by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague over a long-standing territorial dispute between the Philippines and China.

On 12 July, more than three years after the Philippines originally brought the case, the court is due to rule on whether Manila has the right to exploit waters claimed by both countries in the South China Sea.

Experts say the landmark ruling could have major implications for China’s wider claims in the region and Beijing has refused to recognise the court’s authority, rejecting the case as a “farce”.

China claims sovereignty over huge swaths of the resource-rich South China Sea, within what it calls the “nine-dash line”, but next week’s ruling may call into question the legal legitimacy of those claims.

The China Daily, Beijing’s English language mouthpiece, said those in the US who saw the tribunal as a way of invalidating its territorial claims had “underestimated China’s determination to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity”.

“The days have long passed when the country was seen as the ‘sick man of East Asia’ whose fate was at the mercy of a few western powers,” it said in an editorial.

China has stationed troops on Woody Island in the archipelago, installing missile sites, extending the harbour and has started building a helicopter base

China often conducts military drills in the South China Sea and academics interviewed by China’s party-controlled media claimed the drills were a “normal naval activity to methodically maintain regional stability, which is not connected with specific events or targeted at certain countries”.

Vietnam on Monday urged China to scrap the latest drills, with foreign ministry spokesperson Le Hai Binh claiming the exercises were against international law.

“Vietnam strongly objects to the exercises and demands that China respect Vietnam’s sovereignty and behave in a responsible manner,” he added, according to the Vietnam News Agency.