Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian responded on Tuesday, saying, "As we all know, Okinotori is a reef, not an island. It is submerged underwater, with less than 10 square meters at high tide."

China reiterated that it does not recognize Japan's self-declared Okinotori exclusive economic zone.

The Japanese government has applied to the United Nations to establish a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone around Okinotori Reef , which will give Japan special rights to explore and use marine resources in the sea area.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian responded on Tuesday, "As we all know, Okinotori is a reef, not an island. It is submerged underwater, with less than 10 square meters at high tide."

He pointed out that Japan was out of For its own selfish purposes, it illegally claimed nearly 700,000 square kilometers of jurisdictional waters on this small reef.

This is even larger than the land area of ​​Japan. He emphasized that this violated the high seas and international seabed areas and harmed the overall interests of the international community.

He explained: "According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Okinotori is a reef, not an island." "Therefore, it does not have the right to have an exclusive economic zone or continental shelf."

Zhao Lijian added that Japan based its claims on the exclusive economic zone area and continental shelf in violation of international law .

An exclusive economic zone is an area of ​​water where a country has exclusive rights to explore. According to Article 121 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, rocks that cannot sustain human habitation or their own economic life do not have exclusive economic zone or continental shelf status.

Japan has "made" Okinotori into an island by cultivating corals, building reef walls, erecting lighthouses, etc., hoping to have its continental shelf recognized, and has a ,200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone in Okinotori waters.

In 2012, the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf did not adopt Japan’s claim on the geopolitical classification of the Okinawa boundary, and Japan’s continental shelf claim based on Okinotori was not recognized by the committee.

According to Bloomberg News, recognition of Japan’s sovereignty claims may restrict China’s naval activities in the region. It quoted the Sankei Shimbun as saying that the Chinese government has stepped up its investigation of surrounding waters, and Chinese scholars have recently published a number of reports refuting Japan's claims.

The British " Guardian " commented that as far as China is concerned, they are just rocks that are not suitable for habitation. But for Japan, these tiny islands in the Pacific, collectively known as the "Far-Away Bird Islands," serve as a key economic and strategic outpost at a time of growing concern about China's military activity in the region.

reports that Japan has announced that it will spend 13 billion yen (£75 million) to rebuild an observation station on the remote Okinotori Island. Okinotori is about 1,000 miles south of Tokyo, a move that could reignite a long-standing maritime territorial dispute between Tokyo and Beijing.

The Okinotori sea area has rich fishing grounds, huge reserves of oil and other energy resources, and rare metals.

This atoll is roughly located between the island of Taiwan and the U.S. territory of Guam, with a length of only 4.5 kilometers from east to west and 1.7 kilometers from north to south. On the occasion of the dispute over the Diaoyu Islands and the South China Sea, its strategic importance is also increasing day by day. This is an ideal place for submarines to hang out.

At high tide, the area of ​​Okinotori currently exposed to the sea is only about 4 square meters. The area is shrinking due to wave erosion. Japan had no choice but to save the reef from sinking into the sea at all costs by building embankments and artificially cultivating corals starting in 1987.

Since the late 1980s, Japan has spent about $600 million building steel breakwaters and concrete shells to prevent erosion at low tide on two small islands that jut out of the water; a third visible island is covered by titanium mesh Cover to protect it from debris generated by the waves.

Japan has also built a three-story observatory to monitor ships in the area and send the data to Japan's Ministry of Land and Resources. A Defense Ministry official told the Asahi Shimbun that the weather station needed urgent repair work before it collapsed due to erosion and regular attacks from typhoons.

Some Western media have taken issue with the illegal arbitration case in the South China Sea. The latter denies most of China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. Since China did not participate in the South China Sea arbitration, the ruling was illegal. Even the Philippine government does not deny this. In addition, China's claim to the South China Sea is based on the " nine-dash line " rather than the reef.Within the "nine-dash line", it has been China's inherent territory since ancient times. Japan's "swearing" to ask China to respect such a result that ignores the facts, is it adopting double standards?