Hong Kong PLA Garrison Conducts South China Sea Live-Fire Drill
China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) garrison in Hong Kong released footage of its forces conducting a live-fire drill in the South China Sea on Sunday, two days after the U.S. Navy said it carried out exercises in the hotly contested maritime region.
The PLA footage was posted to the garrison’s official Weibo social media account on August 16 and “included images of a Hong Kong-based warship, the Huizhou, firing cannons and torpedoes, and also showed military personnel carrying out anti-piracy and anti-terrorism operations,” the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported. Anti-submarine training was one of drill’s main elements, the garrison said.
“The Huizhou is one of the two [PLA] warships based in Hong Kong and the corvette [small warship also featured in the video] is mainly used for coastal defensive purposes. As well as torpedoes, it is also armed with surface-to-air missiles,” according to the report.
The SCMP quoted Beijing-based “military expert” Zhou Chenming as saying that the drill “was not a high-intensity drill and exercises such as firing torpedoes indicated its primary focus was defensive.”
The publishing of the PLA exercise footage on Sunday followed shortly after the U.S. Navy said that an aircraft carrier had conducted drills in the South China Sea on Friday.
“The Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group entered the South China Sea Friday and conducted maritime air defense operations in support of a free and open Indo-Pacific,” the U.S. Navy said in a statement. The USS Ronald Reagan led a strike group in conducting “flight operations with fixed and rotary-wing aircraft, and high-end maritime stability operations and exercises,” according to the statement.
Photo: MARK SCHIEFELBEIN/AFP via Getty Images
