China’s naval forces are shadowing a joint Philippine-US exercise off the coast of Palawan, according to a spokesperson for the Armed Forces of the Philippines.
The maneuvers are the first of their kind within the Philippine Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), outside of the nation’s territorial sea. The area is contested, and Beijing views the location as provocative: China claims a vast swath of the Philippines’ western EEZ as its own under Beijing’s sweeping “nine-dash line” policy, even though the claim was invalidated by an international tribunal in 2016.
AFP Western…
