China’s five-month suspension in US-Chinese military contacts to protest Washington’s arms sales to Taiwan has ended with the visit this week of a US Defense Department official, a top Chinese officer said yesterday.
China put such exchanges on hold in October over a US$6.5 billion US arms sale to self-governing Taiwan, including such advanced weaponry as Patriot missiles and Apache attack helicopters. China, which regards Taiwan as a renegade province, said the sale interfered with internal Chinese affairs and harmed its national security.
In retaliation, Beijing canceled a US visit by a senior Chinese general, other similar visits and port calls by naval vessels. It also indefinitely postponed meetings on humanitarian assistance, disaster relief and stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Writing in the official English-language China Daily newspaper, Rear Admiral Yang Yi (楊毅) said formal contacts would resume with the exchanges yesterday and today between top Chinese officers and David Sedney, US deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asian security affairs.
However, Yang said Beijing would continue to protest arms sales to Taiwan and rejected US criticisms over a lack of transparency in China’s military buildup.
“China will not tolerate any infringement into its core national interests and will make no concession on this principal issue,” Yang wrote.
“China’s reasonable military development and military transparency has long been an outstanding issue in Sino-US bilateral relations,” he said.
Yang also contended that improved relations between Taiwan and China over recent months have “deprived the US of any excuses for continued arms sales to the island.”
The US embassy said the talks were closed to the media, but a briefing would be held today. Meetings began early yesterday and were due to wind up either later in the day or this morning, the embassy said.
Nearly 20 years of annual double-digit percentage increases in China’s defense budget have raised concerns from the US and China’s neighbors, although Beijing says any worries are unfounded.
That figure will be closely scrutinized when the national legislature opens for its annual session next month, amid from falling exports and declining tax revenues.
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
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
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
RSS