China Ships Circle Japan's Disputed Senkaku Islands for Over 80 Hours

China's coast guard vessels completed a record-long deployment to the territorial waters off the Japan -controlled Senkaku Islands on Sunday after refusing orders to leave for 80 hours and 36 minutes, Japanese maritime authorities said.

Four white hull China Coast Guard vessels entered the waters around the disputed islands on Thursday morning local time and stayed in the area until late on Sunday, according to the Japanese coast guard's 11th regional headquarters in Naha, Okinawa.

The uninhabited islets in the East China Sea have been a long-running point of friction between Tokyo and Beijing. China's leaders, who call the islands Diaoyu, sanctioned the patrol as Japan's top diplomat arrived in Beijing for talks over the weekend.

Taiwan also claims the islands as Diaoyutai, but more than a decade of warming ties between Taipei and Tokyo have largely prevented similar flare-ups. The two governments signed a resource sharing agreement in 2013.

The Japan Coast Guard said the Chinese boats harassed a pair of Japanese fishing boats around the island chain in what was now a routine practice . At least one of the Chinese vessels was armed with an "autocannon," the statement said, in the 67th consecutive day of such operations in the territorial waters or the adjoining contiguous zone of the Senkakus.

The duration of the weekend's intrusion was the longest since Chinese maritime security boats stayed near the Senkakus for 72 hours and 45 minutes on December 22-25.

China claims the Senkakus via its separate claim to Taiwan—they belong to one of the island's counties, according to Beijing's laws. Its coast guard vessels significantly ramped up the rarely interrupted sovereignty patrols after Japan nationalized the islands in 2012.

"Since then, China has been using this as an excuse to send the coast guard and other agencies' ships into Japan's contiguous zone almost every day except for stormy weather days , and these ships intrude into Japanese territorial waters several times a month," Japan's foreign ministry said on its website.

Beijing's frequent maneuvers have alarmed Tokyo, which argues China is seeking to change the long-standing status quo in the East China Sea, just as it has in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

The United States, which considers Japan its most important ally in Asia, doesn't take a position on sovereignty over the Senkakus, but recognizes Japan's administration over them. Article 5 of the U.S.-Japan security treaty covers attacks on the island group, too, President Joe Biden told Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan in October 2021 in the hours after the latter assumed office.

Beijing and Tokyo are marking 51 years of formal diplomatic relations this year. On March 31, a day before Japan's Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi began a scheduled visit to Beijing, China said it had established a hotline between the Chinese and Japanese defense ministries to manage air and maritime issues.

In three-hour talks on Saturday with Chinese opposite number Qin Gang, Hayashi raised concerns about the situation in the East China Sea as well as "China's increased military activities around Japan, including its cooperation with Russia ," his ministry said in a readout.

In another meeting later on Saturday with Wang Yi, the Communist Party 's top foreign affairs official, Hayashi repeated his concerns about the Senkakus tensions and lodged protests over the detention in Beijing last month of a Japanese national China suspects of spying.

Chinese readouts of both sets of talks didn't reference the two countries' territorial dispute. Qin told his Japanese counterpart: "Faced with disputes and differences, forming exclusive blocs and shouting out one-sided demands to exert pressure will not solve any problem, but only widen the barrier between each other."

Relations between China and Japan were stable overall, but faced "various disturbances and interference," Wang said, according to an account by the Chinese foreign ministry.

"The fundamental cause is that some forces in Japan deliberately follow the erroneous China policy of the United States, and cooperate with the United States to smear China and make provocations on issues concerning China's core interests," he said. "Such moves are strategically short-sighted, politically wrong and even diplomatically unwise."

Japan's embassy in Washington and the Chinese coast guard didn't return separate emails seeking comment.

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