Chinese Destroyer’s Live-Fire Drill Draws Protest by Japan

Tokyo lodged a formal complaint with Beijing on Tuesday over a live-fire drill carried out by a Chinese warship in waters near Japan’s southernmost atoll, the latest point of contention in the tense relationship between the two countries.A Chinese warship sails near a U.S. destroyer in the Taiwan Strait in June 2023.A Chinese guided-missile destroyer carried out the drill on Sunday in waters about 110 miles southwest of Okinotorishima, a coral atoll between Taiwan and Guam that is the southernmost part of Japan, Japan’s Defense Ministry said. The destroyer had sailed to the area alongside two other Chinese naval vessels and a Russian frigate, the ministry said.Japan lodged a diplomatic protest with China, noting the drill “could pose a danger to the navigation of nearby vessels,” Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Minoru Kihara, said on Tuesday. Chinese forces announced the drill by radio shortly before it was carried out, he said.China rejected Japan’s complaint over the drill. “Chinese activities in the high seas are fully consistent with international law and international practice,” Lin Jian, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Tuesday.China and Russia concluded a weeklong joint naval exercises in waters off the eastern Chinese port city of Qingdao last week. Senior Col. Jiang Bin, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of National Defense, said the drills didn’t target any third country and “played an important role in safeguarding the sovereignty and security” of China and Russia.China and Russia have carried out increasingly complex and assertive military drills in recent years, sometimes spurring neighbors such as Japan and South Korea to scramble jets to track the activities.While the drills show growing sophistication, China and Russia don’t match the degree of cooperation seen in joint exercises involving the U.S. and its allies, analysts say.Beijing and Tokyo have long had a thorny relationship. Tensions worsened recently after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said in November that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could force Japan to mobilize its military.Okinotorishima is an uninhabited coral atoll around which Japan claims an exclusive economic zone of more than 154,000 square miles in the Philippine Sea. China argues the feature is a rock, not an island, and therefore doesn’t come with an exclusive economic zone.Write to Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com and Junko Fukutome at junko.fukutome@wsj.com