BEIJING, Dec 28 (Reuters) – China’s Defense Ministry on Thursday called on Asia-Pacific countries to be on alert over accelerating U.S. military deployment in the region, after Washington issued his plan to rehabilitate an airfield in the Pacific used to drop atomic bombs on Japan during World War II.
The Chinese military is closely monitoring US actions in the region and will firmly safeguard China’s maritime rights, security and sovereignty in the region, its spokesperson Wu Qian said at a conference in regular press.
Earlier this month, a US air force general told the Japanese daily Nikkei that the US military would make “significant progress” in the coming months in rehabilitating the North Tinian airfield, with the aim of deploying planes across the region to face the Chinese threat.
The airfield, abandoned after World War II, is located on the island of Tinian, in the Northern Mariana Islands, an American territory 200 kilometers north of Guam. (Reporting by Laurie Chen and Ryan Woo; French version by Zhifan Liu, editing by Kate Entringer)
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