On Jan. 4, Vietnam formally accused China of violating its sovereignty and a recent confidence-building pact on Jan. 2 by landing a plane on an airstrip Beijing built on an artificial island in a contested part of the South China Sea, according to Reuters.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Le Hai Binh said the airfield, had been "built illegally" on Fiery Cross Reef in the Spratly archipelago.
Meanwhile, China's Foreign Ministry rejected the complaint, saying that the test flight on the newly built airfield on the reef was a matter "completely within China's sovereignty," the Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported.
The incident is yet another high-profile spat between China and Vietnam over the statue of the South China Sea. In May of 2014, China moved several oil rigs into waters within Vietnam's exclusive economic zone, an unprecedented move that sparked a brief diplomatic crisis.
Currently five countries with competing claims in the region have built airstrips in the contested Spratly Islands.
Through actually landing an aircraft on the artificial island, Beijing is reinforcing its claim that these islands are part of the China's sovereign territory. That implies not only control over the islands' airspace, but also the islands' surrounding waters as well. These waters could include oil and gas deposits, and might also project into the exclusive economic zones of neighboring states — areas in which a country has the recognized legal right to assert its security and economic interests, even if these areas do not constitute sovereign territory.
The US rejects Beijing's assertion that the islands are in fact a sovereign part of China — a position that the US attempted to reinforce through deploying the USS Lasse on a "freedom of navigation" exercise near the artificial island in October of 2015
Washington has criticized China's construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea and worries that Beijing plans to use them for military purposes, even though China says it has no hostile intent.
In response to the Chinese aircraft landing, Pooja Jhunjhunwala, a spokeswoman for the US State Department, said there was "a pressing need for claimants to publicly commit to a reciprocal halt to further land reclamation, construction of new facilities, and militarization of disputed features," according to Reuters.
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