US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday urged Chinese officials to apply greater diplomatic and economic pressure on North Korea to force it to rein in its nuclear weapons program.
Tillerson’s remarks came after he and US Secretary of Defense James Mattis met with the Chinese visitors at the US Department of State, where the former general said he saw scope for a better defense relationship.
The extent to which Beijing can influence Pyongyang is key in trying to defuse the North Korean crisis, and Tillerson’s remarks came the day after US President Donald Trump appeared to suggest Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had come up short in efforts to lean on North Korean leder Kim Jong-un’s regime.
Photo: EPA
Calling North Korea the “top security threat” to the US, Tillerson said China has a “diplomatic responsibility to exert much greater economic and diplomatic pressure on the regime if they want to prevent further escalation.”
For their part, the Chinese envoys voiced their opposition to Washington’s deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense anti-missile defense system in South Korea and demanded its withdrawal, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
Trump, who frequently denounced China on the campaign trail, has turned to Beijing to help pressure its ally North Korea, prompting concern among Asian partners that the US might go easy on disputes in the South China Sea, where Taiwan also has claims.
However, on Tuesday, Trump sent a tweet suggesting Xi’s efforts had not borne fruit — a message he reiterated before supporters in Iowa.
“I do like President Xi,” he told the crowd on Wednesday evening. “I wish we would have a little more help with respect to North Korea, from China. That doesn’t seem to be working.”
Tillerson said the US and Chinese officials had agreed that companies from both nations should not do business with any UN-designated North Korean entities.
Trump has made halting the North Korean nuclear threat his No. 1 foreign policy priority.
On Wednesday, the US president took the formal step of extending for another year a national emergency with respect to North Korea that was first decreed in 2008 under then-US president George W. Bush.
In a letter notifying the US Congress of the move, Trump wrote that the “existence and risk of proliferation of weapons-usable fissile material on the Korean Peninsula” together with the “provocative, destabilizing, and repressive actions” of the Pyongyang regime “continue to constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”
Last month, Beijing and Washington signed a limited deal to open new markets for each other’s exports, and a long-standing friend of the Chinese leadership, Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, was confirmed as US ambassador.
However, tensions remain — particularly over China’s building of artificial islands in the South China Sea.
“Secretary Mattis and I were clear that the US position remains unchanged,” Tillerson said.
The Chinese side defended Beijing’s “right to take measures to safeguard its territorial sovereignty” and said Washington should respect its security interests.
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS