China agrees with the US that denuclearization talks can only resume if Pyongyang shows its seriousness about past agreements, a senior US official said yesterday.
China has called for the resumption of talks on ending North Korea’s nuclear program and faced strong criticism from some US lawmakers, who believe Beijing has not done enough to prod its neighbor.
However, US Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, who recently met with China’s chief nuclear negotiator, said Washington and Beijing agreed that North Korea needed to adhere to a 2005 denuclearization agreement before new talks.
“I think that there is a recognition that there is simply little value in moving forward without some very concrete indication that the North Koreans are interested in implementing the 2005 statement,” Steinberg said.
“And the Chinese were very clear on that. There was no disagreement at all,” Steinberg told a forum at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
“They realize that given what’s happened on a number of fronts — both with the actions of the North Koreans last year and then following the Cheonan — that we are not simply going to go back to talking,” he said.
North Korea tested a long-range missile and a nuclear bomb last year and stormed out of six-nation denuclearization talks. In March, South Korea’s Cheonan sank, killing 46 sailors. The US and Seoul say that North Korea torpedoed the vessel.
China has not endorsed the findings of the Cheonan probe and its state media has urged the US, South Korea and Japan not to “bully” the North.
Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu (姜瑜) said last Thursday that Beijing and Washington both wanted dialogue to “create conditions for the early resumption of the six-party talks.”
In the 2005 agreement and a related statement in 2007, North Korea agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in return for security guarantees and badly needed aid.
In related news, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sought ideas on Monday in New York from Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (楊潔篪) about how to engage diplomatically with both the North and Iran in a bid to curb their nuclear ambitions, her spokesman Philip Crowley said, adding that Clinton also discussed the need to fully implement existing UN Security Council sanctions against both countries.
Clinton sought “Chinese ideas on how to successfully engage both countries, at the same time reaffirming that we will continue to fully implement both [sanctions] resolutions,” Crowley said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS