China urges global response to Japan's Tomahawk missile drills

China has called on the international community to respond to Japan's military exercises involving Tomahawk cruise missiles, accusing Tokyo of accelerating its remilitarisation and posing a threat to regional stability.

Chinese Defence Ministry spokesperson Chen Xi said the drills by Japan's Self-Defense Forces in the Pacific demonstrated what Beijing described as an increasingly dangerous expansion of Japan's offensive military capabilities, Caliber.Az reports, citing foreign media.

"The international community should unite and take action to prevent Japan's 'new militarism' from gaining momentum and becoming a source of disaster and chaos around the world," Chen said in a statement published on the ministry's official WeChat account.

Chen said countries across the Asia-Pacific region should remain "highly vigilant", arguing that Japan's stated regional security concerns were being used as a pretext to bypass the constraints of its pacifist constitution and the principle of an exclusively defensive defence policy.

He also claimed that Japan's military build-up, rather than external threats, posed the greatest risk to its own security as well as to peace and stability in the region.

"The nightmare must not be repeated. Peace must be safeguarded," Chen said.

Japan has been strengthening its defence capabilities in recent years, including acquiring U.S.-made Tomahawk cruise missiles, citing an increasingly challenging security environment in the Indo-Pacific.