Leave immediately, in order to avoid misjudgment.
This is the chilling message the Chinese navy broadcast to an American military aircraft a week past Wednesday.
Fortunately the aircraft concerned was not so much a fast jet or even a spy plane but a propaganda flight with a CNN television crew.
Having taken its pictures for the network bulletins they flew away from confrontation.
Two days later the American Vice-President set out his concerns in a speech to naval graduates declaring that “new fault lines” were opening up between the two superpowers and complaining that China was threatening “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea.
In days long gone by a British Prime Minister reflected that an international crisis which enveloped the world was caused by “far away places and peoples of which we know nothing”.
In this case there is nothing much in the way of any people at all in this very far away place.
The place concerned is the Spratly islands, after the British whaling captain Richard Spratly sighted landfall in 1843 and promptly named the island after himself.
In fact the whole archipelago contains more than 30,000 islands and reefs over a vast sea area of 425,000 square km.
In that entire area there is only around four square kilometres of land.
They are surrounded by sea but have no fresh water.
As a result they have never been permanently occupied.
In addition to the European and Japanese colonial intervention, they have been claimed by ancient China as well as the much closer Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam.
Add to this complication they were handed over to the then Republic of China from the surrendering Japanese after the Second World War and one of the islands is still occupied by Taiwan.
Although they have not much in the way of people there is potentially substantial economic value offering rich fishing grounds and they may contain significant oil and natural gas reserves.
Indeed in recent times most direct confrontations have tended to be between Chinese naval vessels and Vietnamese fishing boats.
In addition these tiny islands sit astride a shipping route carrying $5 trillion of trade a year.
The dispute over the Spratlys, where China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei have overlapping claims of maritime sovereignty thus goes back centuries.
But only recently, with the increasingly assertive policies of Beijing and the renewed interest of America , has it gone super power critical.
The remarkable expansion of Chinese power and the global financial crisis that ravaged the economies of the United States and Europe have accentuated the sense that the West is declining and the economic sun now rises in the East.
In 2007, the United States’ economy was four times bigger than China by 2012, it was only twice as large.
Any substantial shift in the balance of power between two countries is bound to change their attitudes and behaviour toward each other.
Therefore it should come as no surprise that new tensions are emerging in US-Chinese relations.
China has adopted a more assertive foreign policy since 2010, taking strong positions in both territorial and maritime disputes with its neighbours.
Its rapid military modernisation programme and cyber-attacks have deeply unsettled Americans and their East Asian client states.
And Beijing has seen Washington’s response to this new toughness Obama’s “pivot to Asia” as a thinly veiled attempt to contain Chinese power.