Tensions in the area rose further when the United States sent destroyers to international waters off southern China to protect a naval surveillance patrol that was involved in a stand off with Chinese vessels.
China says the U.S. patrol vessels were within its 200-kilometer (125-mile) economic exclusive zone, but the United States has insisted they were in international waters.
An EEZ is NOT “territorial waters”!
It is simply an area in which another nation cannot conduct fishing/resource extraction operations.
The US ship was 75 miles south of Hainan Island, so it was certainly in the EEZ, but NOT in territorial waters.
Passage of ships and other “non-economic” activities (including non-combat military operations) are allowed to any nation in another nation’s EEZ… so the Chinese protest is meaningless under international Maritime law.
Territorial waters, or a territorial sea, as defined by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, is a belt of coastal waters extending at most twelve nautical miles from the baseline (usually the mean low-water mark) of a coastal state. The territorial sea is regarded as the sovereign territory of the state, although foreign ships (both military and civilian) are allowed innocent passage through it; this sovereignty also extends to the airspace over and seabed below.
An exclusive economic zone extends for 200 nautical miles (370 km) beyond the baselines of the territorial sea, thus it includes the territorial sea and its contiguous zone. A coastal nation has control of all economic resources within its exclusive economic zone, including fishing, mining, oil exploration, and any pollution of those resources. However, it cannot regulate or prohibit passage or loitering above, on, or under the surface of the sea, whether innocent or belligerent, within that portion of its exclusive economic zone beyond its territorial sea. Before 1982, coastal nations arbitrarily extended their territorial waters in an effort to control activities which are now regulated by the exclusive economic zone, such as offshore oil exploration or fishing rights (see Cod War). Indeed, the exclusive economic zone is still popularly, though erroneously, called a coastal nation’s territorial waters.
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