cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/54735613

China on Monday test-fired an intercontinental missile from a submarine in the southern Pacific Ocean, the first such launch in two years, drawing immediate criticism from regional powers.

In a statement, the People’s Liberation Army Navy, or PLAN, said a nuclear-powered sub fired a “strategic missile carrying a dummy warhead” just after midday Beijing time. The launch was “not directed at any specific country or target,” and the missile “landed precisely within the designated waters,” the Navy said, without specifying where these were.

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Speaking Monday, New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters said he was “deeply concerned” by the latest missile test, which he described as “not consistent with regional stability and peace in the South Pacific.”

Regional governments, including New Zealand, were informed of the test shortly before it happened, Mr. Peters said.

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The missile was fired into the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, a region established by the Treaty of Rarotonga, to which China is a partial signatory. Protocol III of the treaty, which Beijing endorsed in 1987, calls on signatories “not to test nuclear explosive devices” within the zone, which stretches from Australia to French Polynesia in the east and New Zealand in the south.

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Speaking in Fiji, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong also criticized the test, saying it risked “destabilizing the region.”

Monday’s launch comes in the wake of a “rapid military build-up by China” that is lacking in “transparency and reassurance as to intent,” Ms. Wong added, and “underscores the imperative of countries of the region to work together to ensure that it is Pacific countries who determine our futures.”

Ms. Wong was in the Pacific island nation to finalize a security pact and mutual defence treaty between Suva and Canberra, part of a strategy by Australia in recent years to reassert itself as a regional security guarantor sparked by concerns over China’s growing influence with Pacific nations.

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Separate to Monday’s missile test, the PLAN also kicked off military exercises with Russia off the coast of Qingdao, in east China’s Shandong Province.

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