ASEAN and China kicked off their first-ever maritime exercise on Monday in the Southern Chinese city of Zhanjiang. The six-day exercise is part of an effort to avoid military confrontations in Asia, Channel News Asia reports. While China had been officially and publicly proposing the holding of an exercise since 2015, the idea only really picked up steam in 2017 amid a confluence of events, including Beijing’s trumpeting of another temporary ‘cooling down’ period in the South China Sea, writes Prashanth Parameswaran for The Diplomat. Earlier this month, South China Morning Post published leaked aerial photos taken by the US Navy show how close a Chinese destroyer came to colliding with an American warship during a tense face-off in the disputed South China Sea.