CNN:

The US Navy has sent a destroyer close to a contested island in the South China Sea that Beijing has fortified with military installations to stake its territorial claims on the region.

The sailing came as the Chinese military entered a third day of a show of force around Taiwan, a thousand miles away near the northern entrance to the South China Sea, in response to a brief visit by Taiwan’s President to the United States.

On Monday, a statement from the US Navy’s 7th Fleet said the guided-missile destroyer USS Milius passed within 12 nautical miles – the internationally recognized limit of a nation’s territorial waters – of Mischief Reef in the Spratly islands, known as the Nansha Islands in China.

Mischief Reef, which lies in the Philippines Exclusive Economic Zone, is also claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan. But Beijing has asserted its claims to the island by building it up and placing military infrastructure on it.

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