China is preparing to “suspend, cancel or postpone” a series of military-to-military exchanges with the US to protest Washington’s decision to upgrade Taiwan’s fleet of F-16A/B aircraft.
A senior official in US President Barack Obama’s administration leaked the news on Monday night in New York.
Talking to reporters on the condition of anonymity, the official said that Chinese diplomats had informed the US of the pending action during private meetings at the UN General Assembly earlier in the day.
Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Yang Jiechi (楊潔篪) met behind closed doors with US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and urged her to “reconsider” the latest package of arms sales announced last week.
He warned that the US$5.85 billion arms package would undermine “trust and confidence” between Washington and Beijing. However, he pointedly refrained from any specific threats of cuts to military-to-military exchanges, which Washington values greatly.
The delivery of that piece of bad news was left to his staff.
Yang made “very serious representations” the official said, adding that Clinton gave no indication that the US would reconsider.
Pentagon sources consider the Beijing action to be rather more restrained than it was in late January last year when Washington announced a US$6.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan. On that occasion, Beijing made a series of continuing loud protests and stopped all military-to-military consultation for months.
It is generally accepted in Washington that the less bellicose approach this time reflects Beijing’s satisfaction that Obama — bowing to China’s diplomatic pressure — is not selling Taiwan the 66 F-16C/D aircraft that it requested.
Clinton said following her meeting with Yang that the latest sale of arms to Taiwan would help to maintain peace and security across the Taiwan Strait. She praised the improved ties between China and Taiwan under the policy of rapprochement initiated by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).
However, Clinton said that in the short term there would be a need for the US and China to coordinate and cooperate closely through “difficult diplomatic times.”
Earlier, Yang told businesspeople in New York that the US-China relationship would overcome the arms sales problems and “continue to move forward.”
Robert Kaplan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank, has written in the Washington Post that “nothing of late quite captures what is going on in terms of a global power shift as much as the US refusal to sell Taiwan new F-16 fighter jets.”
“The trend line suggests that China will annex Taiwan by, in effect, going around it; by adjusting the correlation of forces in its favor so that China will never have to fight for what it will soon possess,” he wrote.
“Such is independence melting away. And as China’s strategic planners need to concentrate less on capturing Taiwan, they will be free to focus on projecting power into the energy-rich South China Sea and, later, into the adjoining Indian Ocean,” Kaplan wrote.
STILL COMMITTED: The US opposes any forced change to the ‘status quo’ in the Strait, but also does not seek conflict, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said US President Donald Trump’s administration released US$5.3 billion in previously frozen foreign aid, including US$870 million in security exemptions for programs in Taiwan, a list of exemptions reviewed by Reuters showed. Trump ordered a 90-day pause on foreign aid shortly after taking office on Jan. 20, halting funding for everything from programs that fight starvation and deadly diseases to providing shelters for millions of displaced people across the globe. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has said that all foreign assistance must align with Trump’s “America First” priorities, issued waivers late last month on military aid to Israel and Egypt, the
France’s nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and accompanying warships were in the Philippines yesterday after holding combat drills with Philippine forces in the disputed South China Sea in a show of firepower that would likely antagonize China. The Charles de Gaulle on Friday docked at Subic Bay, a former US naval base northwest of Manila, for a break after more than two months of deployment in the Indo-Pacific region. The French carrier engaged with security allies for contingency readiness and to promote regional security, including with Philippine forces, navy ships and fighter jets. They held anti-submarine warfare drills and aerial combat training on Friday in
COMBAT READINESS: The military is reviewing weaponry, personnel resources, and mobilization and recovery forces to adjust defense strategies, the defense minister said The military has released a photograph of Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) appearing to sit beside a US general during the annual Han Kuang military exercises on Friday last week in a historic first. In the photo, Koo, who was presiding over the drills with high-level officers, appears to be sitting next to US Marine Corps Major General Jay Bargeron, the director of strategic planning and policy of the US Indo-Pacific Command, although only Bargeron’s name tag is visible in the seat as “J5 Maj General.” It is the first time the military has released a photo of an active
CHANGE OF MIND: The Chinese crew at first showed a willingness to cooperate, but later regretted that when the ship arrived at the port and refused to enter Togolese Republic-registered Chinese freighter Hong Tai (宏泰號) and its crew have been detained on suspicion of deliberately damaging a submarine cable connecting Taiwan proper and Penghu County, the Coast Guard Administration said in a statement yesterday. The case would be subject to a “national security-level investigation” by the Tainan District Prosecutors’ Office, it added. The administration said that it had been monitoring the ship since 7:10pm on Saturday when it appeared to be loitering in waters about 6 nautical miles (11km) northwest of Tainan’s Chiang Chun Fishing Port, adding that the ship’s location was about 0.5 nautical miles north of the No.
RSS