The official foreign minister Wang Yi visit to Washington and the deployment of J 11 B is their way of sending another message
EXCLUSIVE: In a move likely to further increase already volatile tensions in the region, China has deployed fighter jets to a contested island in the South China Sea, the same island where China deployed surface-to-air missiles last week, two U.S. officials tell Fox News.
ADVERTISEMENT
One U.S. official put the number of Chinese warplanes in the single digits, “under ten,” he said.
The dramatic escalation came as Secretary of State John Kerry hosted his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, at the State Department.
Wang said Tuesday he hoped that “close up” military flights and patrols by U.S. Navy ships over the contested islands would end.
Kerry said he wanted China to end its militarization of the contested islands in the South China Sea.
Chinese Shenyang J-11s (“Flanker”) and Xian JH-7s (“Flounder”) have been seen by U.S. intelligence on Woody Island in the past few days, the same island where Fox News
last week that China had sent two batteries of HQ-9 surface-to-air missiles while President Obama was hosting 10 Southeast Asian leaders in Palm Springs.
Wang was supposed to visit the Pentagon Tuesday, but the visit was canceled. It was not immediately clear which side canceled the visit. Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said a “scheduling conflict” prevented the meeting, when asked by Fox News at Tuesday's press briefing.
When asked about the earlier Fox News story in Beijing, Wang said the deployment of the missiles was for “defensive purposes.”
Woody Island is the largest island in the Paracel chain of islands in the South China Sea. It lies 250 miles southeast of a major Chinese submarine base on Hainan Island. China has claimed Woody Island since the 1950s, but it is contested by Taiwan and Vietnam.
 
Ahead of Wang’s visit to Washington, a spokeswoman likened China’s military buildup on Woody Island to the U.S. Navy’s in Hawaii.
“There is no difference between China’s deployment of necessary national defense facilities on its own territory and the defense installation by the U.S. in
,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Monday.
More than $5 trillion of worth of natural resources and goods transit the South China Sea each year.
Earlier Tuesday, the head of the U.S. military’s Pacific Command said China is “clearly militarizing” the South China Sea, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"You’d have to believe in a flat Earth to believe otherwise," Admiral Harry Harris said.
China has sent fighter jets to Woody Island before. In November, Chinese state media published images showing J-11 fighter jets on the island, but this was the first deployment of fighter jets since the Chinese sent commercial airliners to test the runway at one of its artificial islands in the South China Sea.
The Pentagon sailed a guided-missile destroyer past a contested island in the South China Sea as a result. Late last year, the U.S. military conducted a flight of B-52 bombers and another warship to conduct a “freedom of navigation” exercise.
The Chinese have protested the moves and vowed “consequences.”
On Monday, new civilian
showed a possible high frequency radar installation being constructed in late January.
The imagery shows radar installations on China’s artificial islands in the Spratley Island chain of reefs-Gaven, Hughes, Johnson South, and primarily on Cuarteron reefs—the outhermost island in the South China Sea.
