China lashes out against Abe's onslaught The Chinese foreign ministry lashed out at Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for "maliciously slandering" China's attempt to determine access to airspace over disputed islands. The Air Defense Identification Zone over uninhabited islands northeast of Taiwan known as the Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese has raised regional temperatures and triggered protests from Japan, United States and South Korea. Military strategists say the zone adds to the risk of an inadvertent confrontation in Northeast Asia, where sea boundaries are not delineated and historic animosity runs deep. "We express strong dissatisfaction with Japan's leader using an international occasion to maliciously slander China," read a statement posted on the Chinese foreign ministry website and attributed to its spokesman, Hong Lei. The Chinese side took necessary measures to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity. This is totally legitimate and irreproachable. Mr Abe had explicitly denounced the zone after a Tokyo summit with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The air defense identification zone China has established in the East China Sea is unjustly violating the freedom of aviation over the high seas, which is a general rule in international law. "We are demanding China rescind all measures like this that unjustly violate the general rule," Mr Abe told a press conference on Saturday. A joint statement after the Japan-ASEAN summit agreed on the need for freedom of the high seas and skies and the peaceful resolution of disputes, but did not directly criticise China's new air zone. Many ASEAN members have deep economic ties with China. Military strategists worry that the feints and bluffs increasingly seen between Chinese ships and those of other nations could more easily lead to miscalculations if carried out by fighter jets. China's military has been reluctant to engage in talks over codes of conduct or communication in case of a crisis, said Carlyle Thayer, formerly with the U.S. Pacific Command and now a researcher at the Australian Defense Force Academy. "It's a high-risk game here, of each side flying up to show the ADIZ is theirs," he said. The US Navy said on Friday that the USS Cowpens, a guided-missile cruiser, had been forced to take evasive action to avoid a collision with a ship from the People's Liberation Army Navy on December 5, while U.S. president Joe Biden was touring Northeast Asia. The PLAN ship had been accompanying China's only aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, which China had deployed to the South China Sea in the midst of the tensions over the air defense zone.