Beijing said the People’s Liberation Army has “driven away” a US destroyer that had illegally entered Chinese territorial waters by sailing near the Xisha Islands.

The USS Benfold's actions seriously violated China's sovereignty and security, the PLA said in a statement.

"The PLA's Southern Theatre Command organised sea and air forces to follow, monitor, warn and drive away" the ship, it said, showing pictures of the Benfold taken from the deck of the Chinese frigate, Xianning.

“The facts once again show that the United States is nothing short of a 'security risk maker in the South China Sea' and a 'destroyer of regional peace and stability,’” it added.

The US Navy, for their part, said the Benfold “asserted navigational rights and freedoms in the South China Sea” near the archipelago – which they call the Paracel Islands.

It claimed the Chinese statement on the mission was "false" and the latest in a long string of actions to "misrepresent lawful US maritime operations”. The United States is defending every country's right to fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows, and nothing China "says otherwise will deter us", it added.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi had recently told a news conference in Malaysia’s administrative capital of Putrajaya that China is speeding up talks with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to come up with a nonaggression pact called a “code of conduct” to turn the South China Sea “into a sea of peace and cooperation”.

“We will oppose bloc confrontation and Cold War mentality,” Wang told journalists after meeting his counterpart in Malaysia, the last stop in his five-nation swing through Southeast Asia. (Agencies)