WASHINGTON: The United States called on Tuesday for calm between Japan and China
after Beijing sent ships to disputed islands in the East China Sea in response
to Tokyo's purchase of them.
"We think, in the current
environment, we want cooler heads to prevail, frankly," said Kurt
Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.
Campbell, echoing remarks this
weekend by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the end of a tour of Asia,
said that calm was critical because the region serves as a "cockpit of the
global economy."
"The stakes could not be
bigger," Campbell said at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, a think tank.
"We believe that peaceful
dialogue and the maintenance of peace and security is of utmost importance
always but particularly now in this set of circumstances," Campbell said.
In line with repeated US
statements, Campbell said that Washington did not take positions on the various
and increasingly bitter territorial disputes around Asia.
China said that it was
dispatching two marine surveillance ships to "assert its sovereignty"
over the islands in the East China Sea known in Chinese as the Diaoyu and in
Japan as the Senkaku islands.
The move came after Japan said it
would nationalize the islands through a purchase from private Japanese
landowners. The islands lie near potentially lucrative mineral resources and
are strategically close to the Taiwan Strait.
Asia has been riveted by a series
of disputes including tensions in the South China Sea and a flareup between US
allies Japan and South Korea over islets in the Sea of Japan, which Koreans
call the East Sea.
Clinton, speaking Sunday at an
Asia-Pacific summit in Vladivostok, Russia, said that she urged Japan and South
Korea to "lower the temperature and work together."
More broadly in Asia, Clinton
warned that it was "not in the interest of the United States or the rest
of the world to raise doubts and uncertainties about the stability and peace in
the region."
- AFP/xq
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