Chinese balloonist rescued by Japan near disputed islands
Japanese coastguard comes to rescue of Xu Shuaijun after his hot-air balloon crashes into the East China Sea
Xu Shuaijun's balloon developed a fault and crashed into the East China Sea around 14 miles from the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
A Chinese balloonist who crashed into the sea while attempting to fly to a disputed island in the East China Sea has been rescued by Japanese coastguards, marking a rare instance of co-operation between the two countries, which are locked in a fierce territorial row.
Xu Shuaijun, a 35-year-old cook from northern China's Hebei province, departed from coastal Fujian province on Wednesday and flew for nearly seven- and-a-half hours before his balloon hit turbulence and suffered a mechanical breakdown.
According to the Japanese coastguard, he crashed about 14 miles (22km) from the uninhabited islands, called the Diaoyu by China and the Senkaku by Japan.
Soon afterwards Taiwanese officials received a missing person report and relayed it to the Japanese coastguard, which rescued him by helicopter and handed him over to a Chinese patrol ship. "The Chinese vessel thanked the coastguard via radio for the rescue operation," according to the Japan Times.
Map showing location of the balloon crash. Graphic: Guardian
China and Japan's competing claims to the islands stretch back decades, but the dispute has repeatedly veered perilously close to armed conflict since 2012, when the Japanese government purchased the islands from a private owner.
China has stepped up maritime patrols in the waters surrounding the islands; perceived intrusions into the disputed territory are common and both sides have scrambled fighter jets in response.
Diplomatic relations between the world's second- and third-largest economies have soured further in recent weeks, after China unilaterally declared an air-defence identification zone over a large swath of the East China Sea, essentially laying administrative claim to the airspace over the islands.
Last Thursday the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, visited Yasukuni, a controversial shrine in Tokyo honouring the country's war dead including several former Japanese leaders convicted of war crimes. The visit led Chinese leaders to declare Abe persona non grata and freezing top-level diplomatic ties.
Xu is a licensed hot-air balloon pilot who, in 2012, became the first person to fly a balloon over eastern China's Bohai Bay. His profile picture on Sina Weibo, the country's most popular microblog site, shows a thin, bespectacled man wearing a grey and blue sweater and a leather jacket.
"I've returned safely, thank you all for your concern," Xu posted to his Weibo page on Thursday morning. The post has solicited at least 68 comments, many of them lauding Xu for his patriotism.
Xu described his plans in a post in September. "Be a Chinese person with attitude," he wrote above a picture of a waving Chinese flag. He described his voyage as the "hardest flight in history", involving -40C temperatures and insufficient oxygen. According to his calculations, his target islet was 223 miles from the Chinese coast and, at only 150 metres wide, just a speck of land in the freezing open water of the East China Sea.
Nationalist activists from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have repeatedly tried to land on the disputed islands in recent years. In August 2012 Japanese coastguards arrested eight Chinese activists who sailed to an island from Hong Kong and planted a flag on its shore. A few days later a small group of Japanese activists swam ashore in retaliation.
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