China’s recent seizure of a U.S Navy underwater drone may have been an early political test for U.S. president-elect Donald Trump.

On Saturday, China’s Defense Ministry released a statement announcing that its military had come across an unmanned American device in the South China Sea on Dec. 15 and said it would transfer the drone to the U.S. The move prompted an angry response from Trump, who tweeted over the weekend that Washington should refuse to accept the drone, reflecting an increasingly tougher stance against the world’s second-largest economy.

The drone episode was merely a means to assess Trump’s view on the issue of U.S. maritime surveillance, Aaron Connelly, research fellow at Lowy Institute for International Policy, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Wednesday.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/21/china-may-have-been-testing-trump-with-drone-seizure.html