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Comment by mullen | Hacker News Reader

From the South China Morning Post. I wonder why a newspaper in China would print a story about another country complaining about the US Navy transiting through their EEZ waters? I wonder why this article is trying to confuse people about transit rights and EEZ and International Waters? You don't think the South China Morning Post might have another goal?

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SCMP is Hong Kong based. Probably the largest English language paper in Asia and has been around for ages. It is also quite critical of mainland China.

Here is the same story from an Indian newspaper:

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-protests-us-nav...

Hong Kong is inside China and a lot has been happening in recent years as we become more integrated with the mainland. Also, SCMP has been owned by Alibaba for the past five years and since then has been a lot less editorially independent.

But The Hindu writes the same story, so surely this is not relevant here?

No, it's still relevant. The US Operations whole intent was to challenge China's expanding territorial sea claims, and more generally to reaffirm the Freedom of Navigation in accordance with International law (and not just against China), something the US Navy does often across the globe. It's not the first time it's done this in these waters either. China would absolutely seize the opportunity to amplify and focus on the protests of a US ally that feels the US had violated their waters/domestic laws in some way.

A propaganda outlet seizing on the opportunity to focus on a disagreement between allies that it's antagonistic with is unsurprising. Just because The Hindu and the SCMP both reported on the incident does not itself vindicate the SCMP or it's reporting. Note the difference in reporting between the SCMP and The Hindu (Indian) with regard to the detail spent on the Exclusive Economic Zone, Domestic Waters, counterclaims from the US, etc.

EEZ =/= Internationally Recognized Territorial Waters. This was not a violation of Sovereign Territory. The real story here (if there is one at all) is the US not giving India a heads up ahead of time (which it's not required to do, but it would be a friendly gesture among allies). Meanwhile the SCMP makes it sound like the USN violated sovereign territory, and is capitalizing and small political spat between friends to justify it's own complaints against the US (and others) not recognizing the CCP's territorial overreach

From the Wikipedia article on the South China Morning Post:

Since the change of ownership in 2016, it has been alleged to be on a mission to promote China's soft power abroad.[9] According to critics, it is moving away from independent journalism and pioneering a new form of "propaganda".[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_China_Morning_Post

There's a lot more in the article on bias at that organization. Bottom line: this publication carries propaganda, and the Chinese government has strong incentive to drive a wedge between India and the U.S.

> From the South China Morning Post. I wonder why a newspaper in China would print a story about another country complaining about the US Navy transiting through their EEZ waters?

Arguably, this works equally well ot better if you reverse it to “about India complaining about a foreign navy transiting through their EEZ waters” and retain the rest of thr post as is.

SCMP didn't write the article. It's a syndicated piece from Reuters.

The US media posts stories about China violating other sovereign waterways all the time. Why are we salty about China doing the same thing?

The EEZ (200nm from shore) is not part of the sovereign territory of a nation. The territorial waters (~12nm from shore) are.

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