China announced new military drills in the East China Sea, adding to exercises underway in other areas that may further disrupt domestic air travel and add to tensions with neighbors over territorial disputes in the region.
China begins five days of drills in the East China Sea this week, the Ministry of Defense said in a statement on its website Sunday. Those exercises, which the ministry called routine, come while China is holding live-fire drills off Beibu Bay, or the Gulf of Tonkin, near Vietnam and drills in the Bohai Strait that both end Friday.
While the scale of the current drills is bigger than in the past, it's a coincidence the annual exercises are being held at the same time, Beijing News reported Sunday, citing Zhang Junshe, a researcher at Navy Military Research Institute.