Ok folks.

Here is the link to the China Daily article responding to yesterday's claims about Chinese vessels harassing the USNS.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-03/11/content_7565717.htm

Obviously this is just the beginning of a few naval incidents involving the US and China. You can see that experts here have been quoted talking about 'intelligence' gathering and the US 'testing the waters'. (Hainan is fairly important for the Chinese - you might remember the Hainan Spy Plane incident in 2001. China is also building what the South China Morning Post says will be 'China's largest' submarine base there.)

Alongside that comes claims this week of North Korean satellite or missile launch - depending on your view - and claims by North Korea that US-South Korean military exercises are about a possible invasion.

"These war exercises were kicked off by the U.S. and the South Korean puppet war-like forces across South Korea at a time when the inter-Korean relations have reached the worst phase and the situation has grown so tense that a war may break out (at) any moment due to the reckless policy of confrontation pursued by the South Korean conservative authorities," North Korea's official KCNA news agency said. Well, that is what CNN is reporting.

'Referring to "war maneuvers" and "nuclear war exercises," a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said they were "designed to mount a preemptive attack on the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) in terms of their scale and contents from A to Z," according to KCNA.'

Should we be worried about these two incidents? Do they reflect troubled times for US-China relations? Might be too early to say, but I will be addressing both of these issues in my next program with Chinese experts.

There does seem to be alot of maritime incidents recently - the claim that an Indian submarine was forced to surface after tailing a Chinese submarine, and of course the strange incident of the Chinese ship being fired on by Russian authorities.

As for North Korea - there has been a lot of bluster in the past, but there is no denying its strategic importance for both China and the United States. Satellite or missile, things are certainly warm.

Let's see what people have to say.

(By the way, the Financial Times runs the Dalai Lama's Tibet 'hell on earth' quote on the front page. Spy allegations nowhere to be seen.)