Canada and Australia, both allies of the United States, are birds of a feather. Both of the two have taken turns to smear China by accusing Chinese fighter aircraft of putting lives at risk by intercepting their military aircraft.
To justify their groundless accusations, both deliberately played down the locations of where the encounters happened, never mind admitting what their militaries were really up to.
Ottawa and Canberra may feel embarrassed to admit the truth, which is their surveillance aircraft poking their noses around China's territorial waters. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has complained about Canadian patrol planes in the East China Sea buzzed by Chinese fighter jets in recent days, claims that the Canadian surveillance was to monitor the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's compliance with sanctions.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said that the United Nations Security Council has never allowed a country to carry out military surveillance in the seas and airspace of other countries in the name of enforcing sanctions.
As for the close encounters between Chinese and Australian planes, the responsibility for any mishap would lie on the Australian side: On May 26, an Australian P-8 anti-submarine patrol aircraft repeatedly approached Chinese airspace around the Xisha Islands in the South China Sea for close-in reconnaissance despite repeated warnings from the Chinese military. The Southern Theater Command of the People's Liberation Army mobilized naval and air forces to identify it and warn it off.
China has good reason to ask what Canadian and Australian military craft are doing on its periphery so often, because such activities have become routine. Such dangerous encounters would not happen if the Canadian and Australian militaries did not provocatively and irresponsibly come to ferret around China's periphery. It is extremely troubling that the two US allies in their enthusiasm to curry favor with Washington have heightened the frequency with which they engage in such risk-laden acts of snooping.
The shamelessness of their hypocritical cries of foul play is only worsened by the recent bleating of Canberra at the sight of Chinese naval vessels sailing through international waters off the Australian coast.
It is not hard to imagine the uproar that would ensue if China decides to conduct so-called freedom of navigation operations near the territorial waters of the US and its allies.