BEIJING – Beijing on Tuesday launched a website asserting Chinese sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands.
The website,
_??, was unveiled by China’s National Marine Data and Information Service.
It came as a trio of Chinese coast guard vessels made their latest patrol of the waters surrounding the disputed islets, according to a notice posted on the website of the Chinese State Oceanic Administration.
Featuring a Chinese flag on its front page, the new website displays legal documents, maps and a timeline dating back to 1403, the year Beijing claims the islands’ Mandarin name first appeared in writings.
The documents on the website “provide strong evidence, from both a historical and legal perspective, that the Diaoyu Islands are China’s inherent territory since ancient times,” the official Xinhua News Agency wrote.
It added that the site, which is currently available only in Chinese, will soon be launched in at least seven other languages, including Japanese.
Beijing and Tokyo have been engaged in a bitter and long-standing battle over ownership of the island chain, known as Diaoyu in China.
The dispute was exacerbated when Japan nationalized some of the archipelago nearly two years ago, and the sea and air around the contested isles have seen increasingly dangerous standoffs since then.
In November, a meeting between President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe raised hopes of a detente.
But two weeks later, Chinese ships returned to the territorial waters around the islands in their first patrol since the summit, with both sides warning the other to leave the area.
Japan’s Foreign Ministry already has a section on its website about the island chain available in 12 languages.
“There is no doubt that the Senkaku Islands are clearly an inherent part of the territory of Japan, in light of historical facts and based upon international law,” it says.
The disputed archipelago is not the only uninhabited territory to have a presence on the Web.
Others include Rockall, the 25-meter-wide remains of an eroded volcano nearly 500 km off the coast of Scotland, and Surtsey, one of the world’s newest islands, which belongs to Iceland and was formed by a series of volcanic eruptions in the 1960s.
Norway’s Bouvet Island, deep in the South Atlantic Ocean, has an entire top level domain devoted to it — bv — but no websites currently use it.
China launches website laying claim to Senkaku Islands
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