The United States has criticized China for not providing adequate advance notification before conducting an intercontinental ballistic missile test in the Pacific last month. In response, China’s ambassador for disarmament affairs, Li Chijiang, retorted that the US has no right to make irresponsible remarks and emphasized that China has always conducted ICBM tests in a safe, regulated, and responsible manner.
US State Department official Alexandra Nibarg said at a disarmament meeting in Geneva: “Beijing did not improve transparency, nor did it provide sufficient advance notice. Instead, it took confusing and provocative actions.”
Nibarg was referring to China's July 6 test of a submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. She said China did not notify all potentially affected states, and even countries that did receive notice “got the notification at most two hours in advance.”
In the same meeting, Li Chijiang pointed out that China has always conducted ICBM tests in a safe, regulated, and responsible manner, providing advance notifications to the US and other countries, adopting prudent and reasonable measures to ensure that the launches do not harm the interests of any country. He emphasized this fully demonstrates China’s goodwill and sense of responsibility, and such goodwill gestures should not be hijacked by geopolitical calculations.
Li Chijiang said the US is not qualified to point fingers at China on missile testing issues, noting that China has the lowest number of test launches among the five nuclear states. The US is the country with the most and most frequent ICBM test launches in the world; the US has not fulfilled its notification responsibilities for missile tests seriously and has no right to nitpick China’s goodwill advance-notice efforts.
Li Chijiang also stated that China firmly opposes certain countries abusing the Conference on Disarmament platform for political manipulation. For its own political interests, the US has lured some countries—including non-members of the Conference on Disarmament—into making joint statements, nitpicking and unwarrantedly criticizing China’s goodwill notification of missile tests. This is typical political manipulation and blatant double standards.
The United States, along with roughly 40 other countries, issued a joint statement warning that conducting ballistic missile tests without advance notification poses dangers.
At about noon on July 6, a Chinese navy strategic nuclear submarine test-fired a submarine-launched strategic missile with a training dummy warhead into the Pacific Ocean. This was China’s first public ICBM test in the Pacific in nearly two years. Prior to the test, Beijing issued only a brief notice to a very small number of countries. According to monitoring agencies, the missile appeared to land in a sea area between the Solomon Islands, Nauru, and Tuvalu.